So has anyone tried/made a laser flashlight?

A blue laser flashlight? I'm reading the new Popular Science and it says the new Audi has blue laser modules which shine through a phosphor plate which turns the glow white and it's 3x more powerful than LED's and can illuminate 500yrds. Someone PLEASE make a handheld one

Re: So has anyone tried/made

Have you read BMW developing laser headlights .

Norm

Re: So has anyone tried/made

There are some definite safety challenges involved. BMW/Audi can afford the insurance against accidental laser escape. Can you?

Re: So has anyone tried/made

well if we can control lasers themselves, and there are millions in people's posseseion, i'm pretty sure we can control laser in flashlights if we had it. now bigger question, is it worth to do in a flashlight???
it may be 3x as bright, but what is lm\w number? complexity? price?..........etc

Re: So has anyone tried/made

Interesting. I don't know much about how LEDs work but those who dedome say if you remove remove the phosphor layer, the light becomes blue. Do LEDs already work in a similar way?

Re: So has anyone tried/made

It's not complicated, not sure why nobody's made it yet.

You will lose some efficacy and light quality if you try to make it safe, but safe is just a matter of replacing the glass lens with a filter lens that blocks the blue wavelength.

IMO, it would be best to wait until you can get metal coated with phosphor, or glass impregnated remote phosphor panels. Something toughter than the current plastic ones available now.

edit:
I hate advertising for this company, so I'll just mention that they generally make lasers, but do have an attachment cap for their high power blue laser that effectively turns it into a flashlight. They use phosphor impregnated plastic, so they use a grating to split the beam up, in order to decrease the "concentration" of light on the phosphor panel. The panel is then imaged by a small reflector.