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Thread: New from X-Laser: X-Beam 2500 for $2500

  1. #11
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    Now what if a 2.5w of a different brand has the same beam spec? Is this 2.5w now a 5w? Lol
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  2. #12
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    swamidog is online now Jr. Woodchuckington Janitor III, Esq.
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    Quote Originally Posted by JD3 View Post
    Just read a Facebook post from them that states "2.5w of apparent brightness" slightly misleading, and how can you visually tell the difference between 2.1, 2.2, 2.5 etc
    no. it's not slightly misleading... it's totally meaningless.
    suppose you're thinkin' about a plate o' shrimp. Suddenly someone'll say, like, plate, or shrimp, or plate o' shrimp out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin' for one, either. It's all part of a cosmic unconciousness.

  3. #13
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    Only reason this peaves me is....

    Some kid is going to buy this, because it's a "cheap 2.5w", and run around telling people he has a 2.5w. Which could potentially take business from a person with a real 2.5w that this person could not afford.

    Laserworld is a bit worse though.
    They will brand ie.
    PIKO 18
    (15w guaranteed, 19w max)

    Lol
    "This is not "work". It's a disease, addiction and passion. Only slightly cheaper than cocaine, but similar effects."
    -dnar

  4. #14
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    Now I do have a "2.5w" laser with a dead red diode in te array that still registers 2.505 on my Laserbee.

    Nice to get more than you are told you are going to get.

    On that note. Visually I had NO idea the projector was down roughly 170mW. The only way I could tell was a meter, and the colors weren't mixing properly against another laser
    "This is not "work". It's a disease, addiction and passion. Only slightly cheaper than cocaine, but similar effects."
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  5. #15
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    Odd colours is often the only way you spot an issue with one of the modules, especially if you have a pair of identical projectors.
    Pure R, G or B has to go a long way off (IME) before you spot it visually.
    Frikkin Lasers
    http://www.frikkinlasers.co.uk

    You are using Bonetti's defense against me, ah?

    I thought it fitting, considering the rocky terrain.

  6. #16
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    Hi guys,

    I thought I would jump in here and clear a few things up (maybe!).

    First, with respect to the performance features, as Brad says we know the regs well and follow them as precisely as possible. This gets into a lot of nuance very quickly but the short version is that yes, as you say JR, those things are required as performance features, with some exceptions. We have made our business out of doing things differently (and more sensibly we think) and everything we make is certified compliant to CDRH. We like to remove potential points of failure to make the simplest, highest performing systems we can while maintaining the excellent level of safety required by the 1040.10 standard. I will readily admit this may seem confusing (and it is for sure), but I assure you our QA process is second to none and the design of our systems meets all US safety criteria.

    Secondly, with respect to the point about power/brightness... before you jump to conclusions, hear me out. It is more complicated than it may seem. Before reading the below, please note that i am speaking mainly of 3B and lower power Class 4 products, not high end systems, not OPSL, etc. because those products tend to be much more homogeneous in effect given the similarly of components. You may notice that we do not use the “apparent brightness” language in the Defiant series for example. In the club/DJ market space it is the wild west as far as components are concerned.

    The basic issue is this: more than at any other time since I have been in this business, “power” has become a meaningless specification. Think about it - For safety calculations, you really need to know energy and/or irradiance, not power. Certainly knowing power can help you if you don’t have energy (and pulse data if applicable), but if you do (which we provide as objective measurements on our spec sheets) power is not really necessary from a safety standpoint.

    The only other reason that people would want to know power is to infer brightness, or put more broadly, the “effect” of the thing. Here’s the problem, as I have said before and I am sure many of you would agree with, “brightness” is impacted much more strongly by a combination of optical characteristics, scanning characteristics, wavelengths, etc. than power alone. Is a 2W laser going to be brighter than a 10W laser? No, probably not… but within say 300% on either side of a power specification - you can get extremely close. Look at 637 being roughly 3x brighter than 655 at the same power as an example. Add to this better modulation, etc. and you can make a laser that is maybe up to 5x apparently brighter than another without changing power at all.

    This causes a number of problems, one of which is a marketing problem, but the bigger one is frankly a DESIGN problem. People buying our lasers without doing an A/B in situ which is often extremely hard to arrange, really have no clue how a 1W X -Laser compares to a 1W Y-Laser or a 1W Z-Laser in terms of EFFECT, and there is no standardized metric to quantify that.

    Stepping out of a competitive comparison, let me ask an artistic question. Is 1.6W ENOUGH to cut through this lighting design? Well… that entirely depends on how the 1.6W is built. If it is 80% blue with a 655 red, and mirrors that are too small to capture the whole beam, and really crappy modulation, etc., maybe not. But, if that 1.6W is built the way we build an X-Beam where we make all of the decisions to maximize brightness, then you have a MUCH better shot. Same power, two entirely different philosophies of construction. Accordingly, have a “real 1.6W” is a meaningless specification because it has no real bearing, except in orders of magnitude perhaps, on the effect - which at the end of the day is what the designer really needs to know.

    This is doubly true given that there is no standard for measuring power creating profound disparities between manufacturers. Even if there was, no one measures power under modulation or a half dozen other variables which can cause further profound disparities in real world usage scenarios. That makes a “power” specification even less relevant because it really does not speak to effect.

    So, we give people what they need, an accurate, objective energy specification with which to make good safety decisions, and an estimate of apparent brightness based upon our subjective but experienced eyes.

    Yes, we do A/B comparisons with many different products before we land at a number to make sure the marketing is as faithful as possible, if not conservative. We compare each model against our own models, and models from 3-4 other manufacturers to make sure that our product appears brighter in our testing than the others at X “real” power level. We test them again and again and use conservative numbers so we can under-promise and over-deliver. The net result is the “magic” that Brad saw where a laser with 1.6W of power was easily holding its own against much more powerful lasers. If you were a designer, how could we quantify that difference for you without using “apparent brightness?”

    Is there a standard reference projector out there to compare it against? No… and that’s why we use a representative sample of many projectors and use conservative numbers.

    Then and only then do we make it part of the product marketing and clearly identify it is “apparent brightness” so as not to confuse objective measurements with subjective evaluation.

    At the end of the day, customers really need help understanding what they are buying. Most are not laser savvy enough to know that one red is brighter than another red, or one beam profile is brighter than another, or bigger mirrors catch more of a larger beam but make your scan speed slower. In so doing, we are trying to help them make fair, accurate and externally valid ‘apples to apples’ comparisons which, not for nothing, hold up in the real world again and again - as Brad said he witnessed at DJ Expo.

    We often have clients replacing their old lasers with X-Lasers that have up to 80% less actual power (no kidding, that “up to” situation removed a pair of 13W lasers which were working fine, and substituted a pair of 2.5W lasers and the client was VERY happy) and getting a better show out of them. A 50-65% power reduction is more common than 80 of course, but the point still holds. We have made our business of of making very bright lasers in these power ranges, in part, by making choices such as degrading (or removing) graphics capabilities for people who really just want beams to eek the most brightness we can out of a beam system. You all saw them at SELEM last year. We have to quantify that for people somehow, and it was important to us to do it in a way that was as transparent as possible.

    We have discussed EXTENSIVELY internally how to do this better, and by better I mean more objectively. As it is I personally feel that it is quite accurate and I stand behind every number we use given that I have seen them prove accurate, in the real world, many dozens, if not hundreds of times.

    If we could come up with a luminosity standard that had strong external validity and could account for differences in modulation, etc., we would use it. I much prefer objective things. But, until then, we have to quantify brightness somehow and this is the best way we have found to do it - carefully, diligently, and in a way that is true to life.

    Let me also be clear about this point: while this does have a marketing angle for sure (and it should because we should be able to make fair competitive comparisons against competing products), I am not saying that X-Laser’s are flatly better than everything else and we can make lasers 4x brighter than everyone else with the same power, etc. That would be unreasonable.

    I am saying that we make decisions, carefully, to build products with a particular philosophy in mind which is to maximize the customer experience of working with the thing, to the greatest extent we are able, within any given price point. X-Beams are bright, in part as I mentioned, because we take from other capabilities to focus on apparent brightness. If someone has a better way to quantify that, subjectively or objectively, I’d love to discuss it.

    I have attached some images to give context to this conversation of recent clients who either are showing two lasers side by side in an A/B or are showcasing an effect that they felt was better than what they had before. BTW, in each of these photos, the client really didn’t believe that the effect would be better and most of them demoed the products ahead of time, saw what is reflected in these pictures and THEN decided to buy.

    At the end of the day, we have to tell people what they are buying and as Brad said, I think we are even a little conservative in our estimates.

    We recognize that this kind of a system relies on people trusting us, but we endeavor to be good custodians of that trust, and I think we are.

    Is it perfect? No. But we couldn’t keep letting perfect be the enemy of better and at the end of the day, our clients are happy and feel that the products were properly presented. Click image for larger version. 

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    Last edited by DanG; 09-11-2014 at 20:27. Reason: Typos

  7. #17
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    Thanks for explaining that much more clearly than I ever could.

    As mentioned, I saw it in person and it's impressive. I really need to dig up a video from SELEM from last year where X-Laser put their X-Pod green units on the scaffolding and they are (I believe) 50mW. When you see how they looked along side of two Mobolaser beam tables each outfitted with roughly 2.2 watts of 532 (One a Melles Griot yag and the other an Asian brand), it's astounding and you can barely see a difference.

    It also became very apparent to me at SELEM this year just how little difference there can be in "brightness" with for example 6 watts next to 2 watts. But, that's also as Dan said, how that power is achieved. 2 watts of it was 650 so... "power" really is sometimes meaningless.

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