Have you ever thought for a second what’s hidden inside all the lasers you can seat festivals, concerts and clubs? What’s inside that magical black box that can output such beautiful colours and razorsharp laser beams?
The experts from Kvant Lasers s.r.o. develop, design and manufacture such laser display systems and do that all in-house. They revealed to us some of the key features that make their laser systems one of the best in the world of lasers.
Diodelasers (or diode laser technology) is definitely the most important technology in all the modern laser systems. It allowed lasers to becomes maller, lighter, better, more reliable and also lot cheaper. Still, the fact that someone is building lasers using semiconductor laser diodes doesn’t mean, that their projectors will be top notch. Not at all! There’s far more to it…
All kinds of optical beam shaping technologies and processes take place inside each laser module before nice and well shaped, clean laser beam is emitted out of the box. And there’s only a handful of companies who can do that these days. Constant research and development in this field is what keeps Kvant guys ahead of the game at all times.
Using only quality components when manufacturing laser display units is essential, but the quality of all the optical bits and piecesis critical. It doesn’t matter how good is the scanning system or software control if the most basic element such the laser beam is no good.
Then of course we need to steer the bamin to all kinds of direction and do that really fast to allow us create all the cool images, effects and animations. This is done by electro mechanical component called Mirror galvanometer – or scanner. Faster and more precise the scanner is, better is the performance of the whole unit.
Normally we use couple of scanners, each for steering the beam along single axis. By working together (beam goes through both of them, one after another) these two scanners allow us to draw circles, squares and pretty much anything we like. There are some mechanical limitations and it is important to understand, that lasers are good mainly for outline shapes and simple images.
All above cover the main building blocks of to days modern lasers. Of course, there are tons of other important parts of laser display system such as power supplies, driving electronics, cooling and so on, but those are beyond the scope of this article.