Well, today I received the Optotronic 500 mW.
After the first shot I understand that the laser could have a lot of issues: beam not so powerful, beam out of azimuth (not parallel to the host), dirty dot (patterns and artifacts) and heatsink completely cold after some minutes of work. The rest of the host become hot quickly.
So I have unmounted the heatsink from the main body, and inside I saw an horror gallery: the first collimation lens was mounted in a cilindrical barrel locked to the diode heatsink simply by a trembling black tape. The beam was out of azimuth because the barrel was non perpendicular to the diode+crystals block. The inside barrel lens was so badly fixed that a pressure in the right side of the tape for a certain amount of time was enough to place the lens in a better but not perfect place (sic). Then I blowed both the lenses with Visibledust Zeeion Blower to slightly reduce the dirty dot. But the bad surprises did not stop here. The thread where the heatsink is normally screwed was wrapped with a lot of teflon tape, so the thermal transfer between the two aluminum parts was seriously compromised. So with a lot of patience I have unwrapped all the teflon tape from the thread to discover another horror: the thread was literally caked by different kind of glues, both soft like silicone than hard like bi-components epossidic adhesive.
With again a lot of patience, with the help of some tools, I have carefully removed all the glues, but at the end of the work the cilyndrical threaded heatsink was very sloppy when screwed to the main body thread, so I was forced to put four smalls drops of Alumina Thermal Paste to lock the heatsink in the right position.
After a general polishing, I put a freshly charged Panasonic NCR 18650-B 3400 mAh cell and I proceeded with the output power check.
I used Laserbee 7W with Ophir head, so the measurement was very accurate.
This is the result:
The laser is heavily underspeced and goes very often in hopping mode (visible flickering).
Conclusions:
Pros:
- Very thin beam;
- Low divergence;
- Good bright.
Cons:
- Very underspeced laser;
- Unstable output;
- Beam not perpendicular to the aperture;
- Dirty dot;
- Bad assembly.
The price was ok, but with 150 extra dollars a CNI PGL-III was surely a better choice.
The laser is damaged, someone has abused the item and handled it without a minimum of knowledge of the facts.
I put the laser together the other lasers only for my personal collection, but surely I will use it rarely.
Please send me a PM with all the needed datas: