Laser Optics Sales
& Distribution

“Catalog optics” companies that sell or distribute various optical elements are also held responsible for specifying and ensuring the quality and performance of what is being sold. Interestingly, there might be more than one vendor for every position in an optics catalog.

Accordingly, production quality might vary from vendor to vendor or batch to batch and thus cause many problems down the supply chain. By feeling that the end-users of high-power laser optics often don’t want to risk and thus avoid buying optics without proof of quality.

However, not all laser optics vendors can check their products by the means of laser damage performance or provide relevant LIDT numbers to the end customer. Also, some customers need to specify LIDTs under non-standard use conditions and it is not easy to find such characterization service.

Furthermore, customers often want to be consulted on complex laser damage-related questions before making the purchase. This complicates the whole optics sales process.

Finally, optics characterization itself does not guarantee a sale as low LIDT numbers can prevent purchases.

Over 10 years LIDARIS has intensively worked with large optics sales and distribution companies worldwide and is well familiar with this kind of laser damage issue. There are at least two ways in which optics distributors can benefit from laser damage testing.

Firstly, finding the best manufacturing technology or vendor and knowing that your optics feature high LIDT values, provides a unique selling point and serves as great marketing material. But for these results to be trusted, they should be determined by an independent metrology lab.

Secondly, the low LIDT values are not always a problem. Not everyone needs extremely high LIDT values sometimes it is enough to know a safe operational limit as no one wants their optics to break unexpectedly. To guarantee quality pass/fail certification tests can be done for every production batch.

Currently, 140 companies worldwide trusted Lidaris to test their optics performance. For large quantities of testing a dedicated service is possible, which handles speed and high-throughput testing capabilities.