How to choose a laser and software.

[Dr Laser]

Lasers is a very very expensive hobby/business. And in this industry the words "what you pay what you get" is more true then anywhere else. I've been there. I thought that if I spend little bit less on lasers this will work just fine. No it never worked fine. It always went wrong. Unfortunately you need to spend money on lasers. Stay away from S-KY (laserb2b), Lion lasers, Lasever, Laserworld and many more. Go for those which are known and with good reputation. CNI, KVANT, LaserWave. They are not cheap but they will work for a very long time. To get you starting get a 1W green from known manufacturers. Good set of galvos and a FB3 or a Pangolin basic. It all about 5K. But trust me you will invest in something that will be upgradable and relialable. It's the same with moving heads. You can buy cheap crup or you can buy Martin which will last...well... I have a few MAC 250 built in 1997. They still work like new. Thats 12 years of serive.!.

[White-Light]

One of the most critical things with animations is the scanner quality.

A cheap Chinese laser will usually have cheap scanners, often slow speed stepper motors and whilst passable for beam shows, these will result in poorly drawn and often jerkey or flickery images.

As others have said, if quality of animation is your goal, you need a decent set up.

If you just want the projector for home use, you could build your own using say a 300mw 532nm green Laserwave laser, some DT25 scanners (DT40's or Scan Pro 30's better if you can afford them) and a FB3 solution.

This would give you a quality green laser (you could build on and add extra colours to later provided you construct a case thats big enough and leave space for extra units for when you can afford them) with some quality scanners (albeit not the fastest out there) and the arguably the best laser controller and software this side of silly money.

300mw green will give you the basis for a 1.2 Watt White Projector based on modules of 300mw green, 600mw 640nm red and 200mw 473nm blue. These aren't ideal figures (ideally you'd want a little more blue) but what I'm pointing out is that 300mw green is an ideal starting point for an RGB / White Light projector as its strong enough to support quite a high wattage (and thus expensive) RGB meaning that if you buy that green now, you won't find yourself wanting to change it for some time, so its not wasted money in the long run. Its something you can build upon.

If you're going to be using it commercially in a medium to large club as green alone, then Dr. Laser's suggestion of 1W green is more appropriate but this will cost you serious money. (I'm presuming you want to do overhead animation projections here - 1W of green has serious implications for audience scanning with beams).

If you decide to buy something off the shelf you want at least 30K scanners (preferably more as many speed claims are exaggerated) and if you're planning to use software to control it, you need an ILDA input.