Laser news - new blue changes the world!

Yep, you're right, although the camera CCD shows it up worse than it is in real life. But brightness for brightness they're right on the money.

Next up looks like it could be a 4W beast, with 2W of 532 and 2W of 445. At some point red could be added but at what cost...!!!
With 532 you look to pay about £1/mW for something reasonable, £300 should have a dual diode 445 setup running, but 2W of 640 is still extemely expensive. That said, new diodes are hitting the market all the time, so it may get cheaper as time goes by. Certainly, my bank balance says I'll have to play the waiting game!

Whilst its a nice idea and there's a few around, I'm not a big fan of lasers of any significant power mounted in moving heads. Given the time I spend setting up and setting beam zones to ensure safety, I'm still not convinced that DMX is a good way to point high power lasers around the place. I've seen some 2W greens being used in a club where they were just given over tot he lampy to operate off his Avo. There were really NO safety considerations taken there.

If you are doing outside work then you probably want 2 watts of green really (with facility to control the 'atmosphere' quite effectively, be it foggers, smoke bombs, fireworks, etc)

Bear in mind that decent scanners have quite a good angle of deflection so you could still scan across a lake, and up into the air with a regular projector. For that video I was only using about 20% vertical angle.
Also remember that the less a beam is pointing towards you, the less visible it is, so you are unliley to be wanting to shoot beams straight up. Also consider the paperwork aspects if doing outdoor shows where you want to fire beams into unterminated airspace. I believe you need to log this with CAA.

If you want to go RGB for outdoor work then I think you need to be looking in the 4-6W total power region really, thats the intention for my big build.

That said, the first outing for these 2 projectors was outdoors, right next to an RAF airfield (we terminated beams on the ground and trees just up the field a bit)

This was with a fogger and fan right underneath the lasers, as you can see, the beams all but dissappear when the wind moves.

Have you tried contacting the company to see what sizes they used for that show? Might be a good start.
Also, they are using lots of single beam type effects, these will always look brighter to the eye outdoors. It also looked like they had some bounce mirrors mounted this side of the lake - a great way to make 1 or 2 lasers look like more than they really are.

The other thing for beam shows that makes a big difference to perceived brightness is the scan speed. Again this is a 'bigger is better' situation on the numbers front for marketing and is only really relevant if you are doing high quality graphics shows. For aerial beam shows you want to scan slower as this means you get longer dwell on each point (and hence it seems brighter). It also means that diode pumped lasers get a chance to come up to full brightness on each point - a known characteristic of some pumped (DPSS) heads is that when modulated fast they don't always achieve max output on each cycle (due to rise time), so slower is better. I run scanners capable of 25kpps ILDA test at 8 degrees but run them at 18kpps which is still good enough for graphics on scrim and good beam shows.

If you're interested I can put you in touch with the importer for the laser heads I use - he also does custom builds and has a range of single colour heads that aren't too expensive, but will be better quality (and have better support) than some others you might look at. PM if you want a bit more info.