A Nonscientiic red laser, green laser comparison

[Glenn E. Meyer]

Last night, when I came home from work, the house was dark. In my vest pocket (not a tac vest - haha) - I had a green laser mouse/pointer from lecture. For grins, I beamed it into the living room. Interestingly, the green spot was bright as expected and there was quite a large visible halo of greenish speckled light around the dot. You could see pretty well in the halo which was about 2 ft in radius at typical room length.

Aha - so I had my 642 with a CT 405 grip. Tried again. There was only a small little and useless red halo.

Does this happen with green laser sights? The lower wavelengths are better detected than the higher ones and I have no idea of the output of this pointer as compared to the CT.

Is it useful to have a green dot in the target if a gun sight also gives you some extra illumination at night? The effect is not noticeable in daylight levels - which is totally predictable.

[Tamara]

Now I need to play around with this. First I have to find my green RailMaster, because the only other green laser I have is one of the MVF-515 VFG setups on a carbine, and hauling that out is starting to get an awful lot like work.

[Byron]

In my nonscientific experience, the biggest issue that impacts scatter/speckle of lasers is cleanliness of the emitter (and area surrounding the emitter). The more dust (or pocket lint, or whatever) near the emitter, the more chance of scatter.

The green laser being noticeably brighter to the eye, the scatter will be more noticeable and illuminate more.

With all that said, I've never personally noticed a significant difference in scatter between red and green lasers. There very well may be a difference, but emitter cleanliness is the biggest factor in my experience. My red j-frame laser grips scatter much more than my green SIRT, but that's because of how they've lived.

[Clusterfrack]

Interesting question. I had to open up the safe and do my own unscientific test. In order from most scatter) to least scatter:

CT Lasergrip (Red)
Surefire X400 Ultra (Red)
LDI DBAL-D2 high intensity (Green)
LDI DBAL-D2 low intensity (Green)

So, at least for my gear, the amount of scatter is not related to the color but is more a function of laser quality.