your oldest laser pointer

i purchased a 5mW green laser pointer when i was in 8th grade from deharpportte trading company, which is now onpointlasers. it was 320 dollars at the time lol. amazing how for the same money i could get a 125mW laser now. to this day it is still my only laser and it works well still.

how long ago did some of you purchase green lasers and at what prices?

i have never been able to see the beam in the dark for my green laser pointer. i have heard some people say that a 5mW green should have a visible beam in the dark. is this true? i can only see the beam when there is some fog.

I purchased my first *GREEN* laser pointer sometime in 2000; I believe it cost well over $200.00 US dollars. I bought it from somebody named Trash.

Red laser pointer...probably sometime in the early-1990s to use in a bar I worked as a bartender for. I remember purchasing a 670nm 3mW directly-injected diode laser pointer for at least a couple of hundred dollars.

I have neither unit at present. I'm not certain what happened to the red one, and the green one was stolen by the cleaners while I was in the hospital in late-2002.

First and currently only laser pointer, a red 5mW one, was purchased in 1998 at Target stores for $14 or $20. (can't remember which) Was a good deal at the time I believe.

my first laser pointer was in '97 or '98 for a hundred bucks from a radio shack. had tons of fun with that light until my brother broke the button on it a couple years later.

Lightmania

I got my first in like 96? (red, >5mw) from frys electronics.. they were $20 which was an awesome deal at the deal (i remembered seeing them at staples for like $100 each)..

Got a 5mw from ebay in 2000 for $150. Was really disappointed by the weak output. I like my 120mw one just fine now though

I just removed the original batteries (panasonic super heavy duty) that came with the laser pointer today. They finally died and do not light it up bright anymore.

They never leaked though! Good AAA's they were!

Bought my first red pointer in '95 for around $40. Still have it, but has since gone multimode. I like the color too

http://www.pbase.com/image/34452642/original.jpg (click here for a larger version)

Here's my first laser (a HeNe Pointer from Optronics in 1988). It is <0.98mW and you can see it in the background fitted to a sniper scope. It's a lovely red-orange colour.
It cost $500 back in 1988 and EVERYONE was just amazed with it when they saw it. People actually ran away from the dot back then because they had no idea what it was. Divergence is high since no focusing optics are used but I have recorded the dot being visible at over a meter wide on a white wall at over 2km from the source.

In front of it is my first green laser (a Leadlight 105 series) which has been tweaked/modded via CPF discussed techniques and now outputs about <43mW. It was always a little flakey but it cost me about $175 from Think Geek.com a few years ago. They were down to about $99 last time I stopped by the thinkgeek webpage.

I lit an incence candle in the room before taking this picture to allow for more smoke and therefore a more visible beam.

Well, my first laser pointer was a Radio Shack model, from about 1994-1995, model...maybe LX-100? Red, 670 nm. I was the first person at my university to use a laser pointer for physics lab work, I think it was either the magnetic field of a current carrying wire experiment, or the young's modulus experiment. Either way, it used a mirror on a pivot, and the original method to do the experiment was to look through a small telescope at the mirror, in which you'd see the reflection of a scale bar a set distance away. I modified the experimental procedure so that the mirror was redirecting a laser dot, and we managed higher precision by using meter sticks several meters away rather than a nearby scale bar.

This is a little embarassing. My first laser was a 5mW new wish laser pointer bought on ebay.

At that time i thought was soooo cool. Now......:naughty: