Crazy difference between 5W LASER and 5W LED!

Do you know the difference between a 5 watt laser and a 5 watt LED? Sounds similar in power, but in this video I will demonstrate and explain the crazy difference!

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#LED #Laser #Brainiac75

[jdotoz]

Counterpoint: if you use a strong enough laser, you will start a fire, which will quickly light the room much better than the lamp.

[nefariousyawn]

Great explanation. I like how the rise in LED lighting has lead to consumer packaging listing lumens and color temperature, which makes more sense than "40 watt equivalent."

[twjackson]

The reason you were getting 66mW at 3 percent input power is because the amplification in the laser is a non linear process much like a diode. There will be a threshold current will the laser will go from some baseline output to its full output. Qualitatively, amplification will be less than the losses in the system below threshold. At threshold, the amplification overcomes the losses, however the gain medium saturates and the laser reaches a steady state.

If you ever actually perceive that laser, its effective lumen drops to zero in the blink of an eye.

[m.streicher]

I love the cooling solution, the heatsink design and the tiny fan. Interesting video, especially the watts/square meter.

[Mike-ozcv]

A very related topic is Lux ratings on bicycle headlights and torches. Sometimes they also specify ridiculous Lumen ratings which are either for the bare LED (without reflector, glass cover etc.) or only sustainable for very short durations. In the end the light pattern (i.e. the optics) is usually much more important than the total power output or brightness.

[gilaraujo]

Great video! never seen it compared like this!
Also PWM scaling is not linear, so at the lower range < 10% theres a ramp up effect, then its roughtly linear to 100%.

[initialb]

Lighting a room is very possible, when you make a mistake homing/start position and run off the work piece hitting the shiny extruded aluminium sub straight, it lights up the room as if you struck an ark welder. It is seriously bright in an eye blinding way. Glasses are not just highly recommended, they are absolutely mandatory, don't risk it, it will hurt you.

[alexanderthomas]

7:35 Cool, you have locally converted your limestone into calcium oxide, which is why it turned white where the laser hit. See Cody'sLab latest video.

[IstasPumaNevada]

3:50 I didn't know turning on a laser automatically started up Kerbal Space Program too. :)

[Bouzsi]

The main difference between a 5W laser and a 5W LED bulb is that when I shine a 5W LED bulb at the floor, my cat doesn’t chase it around like a psychopath on a three day meth bender.

[Basti]

Brainiac has to live in a triangular shaped house.

In one corner he stores the magnetic stuff,
in the second corner he stores the radioactive stuff,
and in the third corner he stores his lasers. :D

[kaiselherzt]

"this is the strongest diode I ever measured"
Styropyro: You gotta pump that up thats rookie number

[domesday]

I've got a 100W infrared laser, and a CNC gantry that actuates mirrors to translate the beam through a 3D volume. The whole thing is enclosed because there's a lot of ways that arrangement can become very dangerous, though it doesn't take quite so little power density to be dangerous since the light can't enter your eye. It will, however, cut through/boil your eye since it's so powerful

[TubeNotMe]

I already knew about the difference, but it was still great to see the specific figures and demonstration!

[tuxontour]

You can try like they do in modern headlights. Point the LASER at the phosphor of an ( better old) LED be advised it is very bright as it is a pointsource of light .

[TaagR]

Try putting a COB LED under the laser and it will be a lot brighter, the phosphor gets excited like how blue LEDs become white. The color of the laser becomes yellow/whiteish, I believe laser headlights work this way. Would be interesting to see how many lumens per watt it would be then, or if it is efficient at all.

[earlmcnulty]

Whew glad I came across this video, I was about to replace all my old incandescent bulbs with 5w lasers, no I know I should the 5w led bulbs. Thanks a ton!

[TheEvertw]

4:00 - love the little flashes of dust particles being incinerated.

[Gunbudder]

I ran into the confusion with power output over area when working with RF antennas. With only changing the physical shape of an antenna, you can go from a fairly weak received power to a received power that is so high that it instantly destroys your antenna electronics. I was able to wrap my head around this by thinking of light bulbs vs lasers. an omni directional antenna is like a light bulb, shooting a little bit of power in every direction. a highly focused antenna (like a yagi) is like a laser, focusing and concentrating all of its power into a very tight direction. I sometimes also think of it in terms of imagining that the power is discrete chunks of RF energy. With a given amount of "energy chunks" input, you can throw some of them in every direction, or throw all of them in the same direction. This can be shown with a gain pattern to physically see what an antenna is actually doing.

Considering that light is also RF (kind of), you should be able to draw a "gain pattern" for light as well. that would be an interesting thing to see