Does the red dot combiner take away any of laser power.
The red dot that came with this Chinese 80watt isn’t very good.
Thanks for any help.
YES ! Every lens and mirror your laser passes through takes a bit of power from your ‘advertised’ power. How much depends on the quality if the lens / mirror. There are some times when you don’t quite follow that golden rule though.
If you get an SPT TR series tube, the red dot is integrated, so the advertised power is AFTER the red dot combiner.
Si mirrors are a bit more reflective than Mo mirrors, but Si are coated glass vs. solid Mo mirrors Once Si mirrors are bad / scratched you have to buy new ones. Mo are solid, so you just keep polishing them year after year…
No, the red dot combiner does not make you lose any power itself. no matter which tube or mirrors you have, the red beam affects nothing in that sense.
The red beam does not, but the combiner puts the laser beam through a partially reflective mirror. You DO loose power. It’s not much, around 2% if I remember right, but you do loose power.
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@Mrrick386, a combiner is positioned with mirror one. It is essentially a ZnSe lens that doesn’t focus the beam. Rather, the 10,600 µm wave length of the CO2 passes through it while the red dot pointer (a ~650 µm wave length now being combined in the path) reflects off of this surface. So using a combiner introduces an extra lens in which the CO2 laser passes (thus a negligible loss in power “at the wheels” as well as another point of maintenance / cleaning to mitigate loss over time).
For reference, Optoaxis produces the following data regarding beam combiner optics: 99% transmission of 10.6µm.
@Matt has made a great video on the installation of a combiner:
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