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Thread: Cant seemt to ascertain where the cost is coming from.

  1. #1
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    Question Cant seemt to ascertain where the cost is coming from.

    Ive been comparing models and brands and noting the skyrocketing price as wattage goes up.

    Components between models appears to be the same. Same scanners, same optics, same controllers, same software, same housings. Though admittedly, the available spec sheets are less than ideal from any manufacturers website.
    What is it that is inside of a higher wattage laser that makes it worth the 30-50 thousand dollars more over a lower wattage model?
    Looking at how simple of a device a laser is, I dont see where that kind of added value could even be placed. Cooling? Power source?

    Im never going to need a 30w laser (want maybe!), but I am indeed very curious what differentiates a 3w laser from a 30w.

    Please, illuminate me!
    Last edited by Vectorfire; 08-11-2018 at 05:53.

  2. #2
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    Why is a 2018 Lamborghini Huracan's MSRP $200k?The fixed expenses are divided between fewer units than the Ford Focus. Higher top speed requires better everything in the drive train. It's gorgeous. Quality is a quantity too. When you spend top dollar for something your expectations are much higher. World class and cheap hobbyist crap are not overlapping market segments.
    "There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun." Pablo Picasso

  3. #3
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    As above, and a different laser technology known as OPSL made exclusively by Coherent that can scale to the higher output powers in ways that using multiple lower powered diodes are unable to achieve.
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  4. #4
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    Quote Originally Posted by JStewart View Post
    As above, and a different laser technology known as OPSL made exclusively by Coherent that can scale to the higher output powers in ways that using multiple lower powered diodes are unable to achieve.
    That's the most cogent answer I've come across so far.

    There is just so little information.

    Manufacturers sell 4 or five, identical looking black boxes specifying only a varying output wattage and price, wirh no other justification whatsoever for the added expense.

    When trying to make an informed purchase it's my intent to understand what it is my money is paying for. There seems to be a concerted, industry wide effort to keep what's under the hood a partial mystery to potential customers. Which is a bit worrysome considering the higher end cost.

  5. #5
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    The ILDA Standard was/is all about making laser projectors an interchangable commodity component. Standards are useful in commerce, not so much in Art.
    "There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun." Pablo Picasso

  6. #6
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    Building a high power system and keep the beamquallity to 1mrd or less is labour intense. Time is money and with more hours in the build the price goes up. In the low range its 3 diodes and done. For a higher power system that has for example 10W of red you need to stack more then 60 single mode diodes and when going multimode its still 20+ red diodes. With more diodes you also have more optics , mirrors, diodemounts etc so that ads up too. A 30W system can be build in different configurations. OPSL has a very low divergence with small diameter beam wich is beautiful but its more expencive. The better the beamquallity and smaller the size dot at farfield the more expencive they are. Scanners are also more expencive as in higher power range you usually fine fast scanners like cambridge , eyemagic or scannermax wich also increases the price of a system.
    Last edited by edison; 08-11-2018 at 16:09.


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  7. #7
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    This is actually a really interesting subject. At the base level if you're not familiar with lasers then I can absolutely see why you'd be confused at the cost increase from a 2W to 20W laser. After all, the cost increase of a 25W to 100W light bulb is minimal. The thing is, the most common laser projector designs out there are based not on just using a single higher powered laser diode, but by combining the exact same diodes to get a higher power level.

    Simplifying the numbers a bit to demonstrate the situation, a 500mW red diode module may only cost a manufacturer about $100 each in parts to build in quantity. $30 for the diode itself, $5 for a collimator, $5 for the threaded mount, $5 for a lasorb, $10 for a cylindrical pair, $5 for the TEC, $5 for the base plate, $10 for the module housing and $25 for the driver. In addition to this parts cost they have:

    $20 in COGS labor for assembly and alignment
    $15 in overhead burden to cover rent, operations staff, marketing, etc.
    $10 in product liability insurance
    5% allowance for warranty repairs and service costs
    10% profit target

    There's more to it than that, but this is close enough to make the point. So in the end this simple module at a fairly low cost runs about $167.50 or $0.34 per mW

    Now let's look at a much larger 10W red module. For parts this would look like:

    $720 for 24 red diodes
    $120 for 24 collimators
    $120 for threaded mounts
    $120 for lasorbs
    $120 for knife edging mirrors
    $120 for knife edging mirror mounts
    $20 for a PBS cube
    $60 for cylindricals
    $30 for TECs
    $25 for the optical plate
    $80 for the module housing
    $60 for the driver

    So a total parts cost of $1595. On top of this we have:

    $480 in COGS labor for assembly and alignment (higher due to far more complex optical arrangement)
    $150 in overhead burden to cover rent, operations staff, marketing, etc.
    $150 in product liability insurance (higher due to increased power level of the laser and the associated hazard)
    10% allowance for warranty repairs and service costs (higher due to increased likelyhood of misalignment and single diode failure)
    10% profit target

    All in our 10W red costs $2873.75 or $0.29 per mW

    So what you'll see is that yes, the costs increase dramatically as we scale up power, but the cost per milliwatt decreases. With low powered projectors, the majority of the projector cost isn't even the laser diode modules but the galvos, housing and service costs. With high powered projectors, you may have 80% of the projector cost tied up in the diode modules with the housing costing a relatively small amount of the overall system.

    I hope this helps explain a bit of it

  8. #8
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    Quote Originally Posted by Vectorfire View Post
    There seems to be a concerted, industry wide effort to keep what's under the hood a partial mystery to potential customers.
    I don't think that's the case. Most of us try to be fairly transparent. The issue is that it's a fairly small industry. There are 2 or 3 companies out there that have 50-80 employees, but most of us are less than a dozen. It can be difficult to publish wide ranging and in depth specifications when everyone at the business is trying to do 3 different jobs.

    We small companies only have so much time in the day and we have to determine how to best spend it. From an engineering perspective, I'd love to spend the time on producing very solid technical documentation on our beam specifications per model, but the reality is that a very, very small portion of our target market even knows what milliradians are, let alone care about if the beam is TEM00 or TEM01. If our audience was more technical, we'd spend more time on technical documentation but they aren't so instead we spend more time on video tutorials or system documentation on how to use to the projectors as opposed to how they're built.

    In short, if you have a technical question don't be afraid to write or call us or any other laser manufacturer, we're all happy to share the information, it's just unfortunately for you you're more technically advanced than most of the user base so you may find the documentation less helpful than your average lighting designer.

  9. #9
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    This definitely helps!
    Demonstrating that there are ten times the number of diodes, optics, etc in one model over another goes a long way to explaining the 10x+ price differential between them.

    its a shame thought that increasing the hardware count by an order of magnitude only reduces the per diode unit cost by .05$ per mw (0.50 cent quantity break, total).
    Last edited by Vectorfire; 08-14-2018 at 08:57.

  10. #10
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    I'm glad it was helpful! Don't take those costs at face value, they're placeholder values that are more or less right to make the math easy.

    In general, at the 1W and below price point you can expect to pay around $2-3 per milliwatt for a whole projector. From 2-5 watts it's around $1-2 and from 5-30 watts it's $0.80-1.50. Lots of the cost is feature dependent and there are of course exceptions to the rule. A 30 watt RGBY projector with OPSL modules will cost 3 to 4 times what a 30 watt direct injection diode based RGB projector would cost for example.

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