Hi all, so I have built an enclosure for my Sculpfun S9 extended system as I can’t find a commercial one. i am now looking for an affordable laser-safe viewing screen. the solid screens are unaffordable at £50 inc postage for a very small screen. I have been looking at orange lighting Gel which is rated at 450nm but I am unsure if this will give protection. has anyone had experience with this material?
Regards
John McNamara
I think it’s clear. If you really want to have a safe, full protecting window, then you need to invest that amount of money. 50 pounds already sounds good, the usual price is about $200 for a certified screen of 20x30cm.
Now you have two choices:
- You wish to be safe. Buy the certified one, or leave no window at all. A camera and a monitor will be fine as well. The only true solution.
- Buy a kind of plexiglas / acrylic. This has NO certification and therefore will NOT provide the same safety level as the “correct” one. Though, regardless of what people tell you, there is no guarantee that you won’t harm your eyes using it. And nobody and no supplier will give a guarantee. Because those materials are not meant to be used like that (otherwise, they would be certified).
That being said, I use orange 2C04 Plexiglas GS for my windows, since it should filter the range of 455nm. Red one is even slightly better. But since there is no guarantee, I have another filtering film behind it and still wear my glasses (full certified ones OD8+, $140) if I continuously stare through the window.
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Have no clue what this stuff is… do you have a link…?
Hi.
If the need for viewing the lasering process is solely monitoring, the most affordable and 100% safe to ones eyes is a camera, connected to a monitor, PC, tablet, etc.
Used ones can be had for free if You happen to be in the right place at the right time, new ones aren’t that expensive either.
Unless You’re talking smaller than A6 “postcard” size, the price sounds IMO/IME too good to be true to be actual laser protective material.
That stuff is crazy expensive as @misken there pointed out.
That’s the ballpark price range I also came up with when hunting for a viewing screen for my DIY enclosure.
So camera it is for me.
I use those for lighting purposes every once and a while, and I seriously doubt that those would work as intended.
Interesting idea though, I have to test it at some point.
You can test it as well, keeping mind that when burned/evaporated, the gasses and fumes released will probably cause both health issues for You and corroding problems for Your machine unless the ventilation is adequate.
Just do a low power material test onto paper/wood/etc. with and without a gel on top of the material.
Then You can determine how much of the power is absorbed by the gel and how much goes through.
But do use adequate ventilation and make sure that You don’t inhale the fumes if You decide to test any plastic material.
Regards,
Sam
Hi.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=lighting+gel
Even though the LED lighting is rapidly decreasing the use of gels in non-pro entertainment circles that require lighting, gels are still the choice of professionals and those who require more accurate and stable colourscape (not necessarily the sculpture kind) on stage.
While I do love the ease, low weight, low power consumption and “free” DMX controllability of (RGB) LED fixtures, I still primarily use PAR-cans with DMX dimmers and conventional MSD mirror scanners when I occasionally do lights.
PAR cans and scanners scream ROCK 
on stage, and I’m an old fart 
Regards,
Sam
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Fun fact: gels are completely transparent to infrared light, so when you want just IR, stacking primary red + blue filters gets it done:
A CO₂ laser deposits enough concentrated energy to cut them just fine, albeit while releasing The Big Stink:
CAUTION Do not look into laser beam with remaining eye!
If your co2 is ir, then how could it possibly cut them?.. 
They supposedly are made from polycarbonate, polyester plastics.
IR is a very wide range of frequencies… my ir fiber would probably go right through them.
Where did you get the photos? neat…
Lasers are not very useful without a lens. Once it passes through the lens there is a focal point, past the focal point the power drops off very quickly. Put something that reflects the beam and the power drops so much it’s pretty much useless. A couple inches away from the focal point on my 40W co2, I can’t mark a Kleenex tissue… virtually no power… wouldn’t stick my head in there and look at it either.
I’m sure all of us have used a magnifying glass to burn wood or other objects. This is how most lasers work… the beam is focused down to a small point where the power density is much higher… once it’s out of focus there is no power to do any real work.
The sun produces a very wide range of emf, including x-rays and gama rays from the suns corona. This damages the dna in your cells.
Burn is generating a broad spectrum of frequencies aside from the actual laser frequency… When the co2 burns it produces lots of these frequencies of light that can damage your eyes and your protective lenses allow through… using a co2, the IR is not visible to human eyes, but it’s a very bright burn when it operates.
If you don’t know the frequencies of the generated light (emf) how do you know if the safety glasses are really protecting you from other sources of laser generated emf that we know damages your eyes?
After one or two jobs, my brain told me to not look at the cut point, it’s too bright so there must be some type of damage occurring… the fiber is mesmerizing when it runs, so it’s hard not to look … but required now and then.
If you hunt around you can find experienced, highly technical people that have the equipment and knowledge to test these optics. I haven’t heard any of them say anything other than the $250 high end laser safety glasses are no better than the $20 Chinese safety glasses. Who are you going to believe, the salesman or the technical people?
I don’t value testing these glasses enough to figure out how to test them without deep pockets. I would think just diverting the beam and using one of the many optical sensors we have could allow at least a proportional value. It would be non destructive to the glasses and give you a good idea of their effectiveness at that particular frequency…
Sorry I was long winded, but I get tired of decisions generated out fear and not from facts.
All I’m saying is listen to everyone, we all have opinions, good or bad based on something. If the base of the opinion is from an Illumination Engineer, that might be more useful than the guy who’s doesn’t know what a laser is.
Use your knowledge along with your research and your common sense to guide you.
Understand how this stuff works is probably the most important lesson you can learn. Then you can separate the 
from Shinola. You will be safe, comfortable and happy with your decision… as it will be the best decision you could possibly make.
Then you can add your opinion here 
Safety should be on every ones mind at all times when operating any tool/machine …
Good luck…
As you point out, it’s all a matter of energy density: even 99.99% transmittance plastic will absorb enough energy to vaporize when you focus enough light on it.
That said, those IR pictures from my old Sony DSC-707 in Night Shot mode are just an itsy beyond visible red and maybe just this side of your fancy fiber laser, because IR LEDs shine around 950 nm and IR photodiodes work best around 825 nm.
A graph I made for a talk at a robotic contest shows some of the emissions & responses:
A CO₂ laser is offscale to the right by an order of magnitude at 10.6 µm, so I’d be utterly unsurprised to know gel filters have more absorbance out there. However, they must be exceedingly transparent to thermal IR from tungsten filaments, because they spend their lives snuggled up to honkin’ big bulbs in those stage-lighting cans and don’t burn up.
What allows you to cut them is the the base material with is known to block IR emf from a co2… and is one of the uses in the industry for co2 lasers…
I was just pointing out that you state it’s transparent then it’s easily cut… the base material is what’s cut.
Polycarbonate, polyester are the base materials according to the information on the Internet, unless you know something different? Both are known to block co2 ir, making them easily cut with co2, even when it’s thick.
I agree for CO2, but diode lasers are different. They are much more focussed and at about 3 m away from the laser, the beam has a diameter of about 10-20cm. That’s still quite small. And the major difference is that the light is in the visible spectrum. So, you will kill your retina very fast. The maximum of 1mW of energy is considered to be safe with visible lasers (common laser pointers), and the smallest diodes emit 5000mW. So, even if the beam is not that focused anymore, or you only get a reflection of it, chances are very high that magnitudes more energy reaches the eye.
I have diode lasers also… they have a lens also… just my 2 cents…
Take care…
Oddly enough I use that solution inside an exhaust vented enclosure I built for my AtomStack laser. I bought a cheap 640x360 USB camera from a discount store and mounted it inside along with some LED strips lights bought on AliExpress. Works great. I can keep watch on the running system without worrying about laser etching my eyeballs. 
Hi.
IMO not odd at all 
.
That is by far the easiest, cheapest and safest -for the eyes anyway- solution to the monitoring “problem”.
Granted, the cheapest cameras may not give the best picture quality, the energy intesity may overload the camera cell unless a filter is used, etc. but given the alternatives, a perfect budget solution in any case.
At some point I’ll try a laser head mounted cheap USB endoscope camera I have, that could be useful for other purposes than monitoring as well.
Regards,
Sam