Helpful person wrote:
I have an application that presently uses a collimated diode laser.
However, one factor limiting performance is speckle. SLEDs have been
brought to my attention and at first glance seem to be a good
replacement for the lasers. A company
www.exalos.com makes a 655 nm
device that would suit me well. My application requires a collimated
light source of constant diameter over a distance of between 100mm and
2m. Radiated power I need is about 1mW.
Does anyone have experience with SLEDs? What are their downside (and
upside) compared with diode lasers?
They're less efficient, and they usually have ripples in their spectra
due to residual etalon effects. They're also usually not that far
from oscillating, so there may be some instability, especially if you
put a fibre pigtail on it.
But they're pretty useful sometimes.
