Arnold got a large quantity...very large...of Taiwanese-made Leadlight 105's years ago, and has a way to go before depleting this supply. They are infra-red filtered. They are easily disassembled and modified. Quality is very good, although no longer state-of-the-art. Lenses are glass. I agree that AtlasNova is the way to go for mid-powered lasers, despite the higher prices. I have alot of them. Most will easily make 40 mW with the pot mod. About one in ten will tune up in the 65 mW range. I have a few that tuned up to 80 mW. Those are rare.
The mainland Chinese made New Wish models sold by DX are not IR filtered. This single fact alone is enough for me to recommend that you not buy them, if for no other reason than to send a message to China that we don't want unfiltered lasers. Unfortunately, now they produce lasers in powers as high as (claimed) 200mW that are also un-filtered. These things are truly dangerous.
I have found QC and repeatability of the New Wish units to be wanting, as well. Plus, they play fast and loose with their power specifications. At one point, a laser that made 20 mW of green and 80 mW of invisible IR was considered by them to be a 100 mW laser. That was bad enough from a consumer confidence standpoint. But now they sell a "true" 30 mW for example, that makes 125 mW of IR in addition to the 30 mils of green because there is no IR filter. So a person thinks he is holding a 30 mW when he is actually holding 155 mW of total power. I think this is dangerous because the guy who thinks it is only a 30 mil unit doesn't realize he should give the laser more respect, perhaps. I know that is flaky logic on the surface, but you know what they say about knives....people only get cut with dull ones. The sharp ones they are more careful with, because they know it is more dangerous!
The NW/DX lasers are easy to disassemble and re-assemble without damaging the barrels, so if you are going to mod one, think about installing a filter.
If you go to the thread about the new DX 30, you will find lots of folks love'em. They are cheap and bright. For most folks, especially those who are looking for units in the low-ball price range, that is all they expect or care about...cheap and bright. So lots of folks are very happy with them. Having seen how they are built, especially compared to the GP-105's, I can't recommend them from an engineer's point of view....plastic lenses, tiny MCA, loose focus barrel threads, poor machining, cold solder joints, switches that fall apart, non-coaxial beam, noisy and/or spurious outputs, mode-hopping, etc. It takes alot of effort to get them to tune up very well at all. Repeatability from one unit to the next is poor, so you might get a good one, or you might get a bad one. It's a coin toss. But I guess for the money it's not much of a gamble.
Cheers,
Lew
