All Posts Tagged With: "Lasers"

For a mere $300, the Wicked Lasers Torch flashlight is like carrying around a floodlight in your hand. It is easily the most powerful and semi-frightening flashlight I have ever seen. However, let’s not kid ourselves into thinking that this a practical device. The only reason anyone should ever buy the Torch is to impress other nerds.

Frank from DragonLasers sent me one of their green Viper lasers to check out. I’d seen a few of the reviews around about these so I figured what the heck, it might be fun to check out.

The laser itself came in nice box, almost what you’d expect a nice pen set to come in and was accompanied by a set of orange safety glasses. The Viper laser itself is a hand held pen sized diode pumped solid sate (DPSS) laser. DragonLaser has models that range from 15mW to 125mW and they operate off of 2 AAA batteries. The company states that uses of the laser cover things like basic light shows, research, alignment and construction, avian dispersal, astronomy, experiments, photography, burning, bush walking & camping, education, defense & non lethal deterrent, entertainment. To be quite honest the only real value I (personally) got out of it was entertainment and it is entertaining.

Wanna get a good reaction at a party? Take one of these along. Everyone I showed it too had pretty much the same reaction. They’d look at it and say things like they’ve seen laser pointers before what’s the big deal or something similar. I’d hand it to them, usually at night and tell them to point skyward and press the button. Everyone of them, even the non-techy girls all were amazed by the beam this thing produces. It’s hard to describe just how bright it is, but as a pointer to point out constellations in the night sky it’s pretty awesome. Just playing around we were able to shoot it at least 1 mile and clearly see the dot of the laser hitting against a metal water tower.

Aside from the entertainment value, I don’t have a practical use for such a device. However, I can see where it has practical applications for some of the stated uses. I’m not well versed in the power of the different lasers but we did try and get it to pop a black balloon which it did everytime as long as the balloon was empty. I tried repeatedly to get it to pop a water filled balloon but never could get it to do it. My theory is the water somehow insulated the balloon from the laser and we tried both hot and cold water.

If your in the market for a laser then you should definitely check these out. Ranging in price from $99 to $399 for varying power output these are some fun little gadgets to mess around with.

Here’s a few photos a managed to capture.
#2 just compares the size of the laser to your standard ball point pen
#4 is the dot shining on my wall with windows on both sides of me. It’s pretty bright in here.
#6 is in the bathroom with the lights off and using the camera’s flash.
#5 is the same shot without the flash. Its blurry cause I handheld the camera but you get the idea of the intensity.

There’s been a couple of reviews around about Dragon Lasers, the most recent I’ve seen is from OhGizmo. A rep for the company that makes them contacted me about doing a review of the product and I’m happy to report I got the shipping notice today (thanks Frank). From what I’ve read these babies are pretty cool so I can’t wait to get my hands on it. I live out in the country so if you hear anything about strange lights in the skies of rural North Carolina, that’ll be me. Look for the review in a few weeks, after we give it a good work out.