I need to tell you a secret. I know fuckall about lasers.
I know that for someone as intrinsically tied to the future as I am it must be a disappointment to learn this, but it’s true. I understand that they shoot photons out in such a way that they lase and are shiny and can occasionally and inexplicably be made into swords, but beyond that I’m pretty much just happy they are around, because I hear they’re pretty useful.
So when Bigha offered to send me a Jasper Laser for review, I sort of mumbled yes and forgot about it, thinking at the time I’d stupidly accepted yet another boring gadget that I would be beholden to review despite having absolutely nothing to say about it. And that was true, actually, until I got drunk.
I had taken the Bigha Jasper out of its little padded case when I had gotten it and sort of shone it around the room. As a kid, I had the momentary fascination with red laser pointers that everyone else had there for a couple of years, at least until a few hundred jackasses decided to ruin movies by gently massaging the hero’s codpiece with a little red dot and we all decided they basically sucked. And basically, they did.
Oh, so I took it out and waved it around the room, and lo, it was green. Really bright – you could see the beam itself sometimes, which you can’t usually with a red one – but still sort of boring. The one hint I had that this might be sort of powerful was when I shot, on a whim, into a bottle of Gatorade. It lit up very brightly, so that was something. At that point I figured it was a $130 way to make Xtreme Drinks even more Xtreme. You haven’t really lavaboarded until you’ve lavaboarded with laser-fired Gatorade.
So then we had a BBQ, and I was sitting outside with my neighbors, and it had just gotten dark, and we had just gotten drunk, so it seemed like the perfect time to bust it out. It was, to say the least, a crowd pleaser. We shot the Jasper laser so far down the street we could barely see its spot (it grows slightly the farther away it is, so it always appears to be roughly the same size). In fact, using my girlfriend’s eyes as a control, I was able to confirm that the Jasper laser actually shines farther than I have the ability to perceive green spots, which means the laser also serves as a handy way to determine if you need new glasses or not.
And that’s it, really. It’s a really, really, really bright laser, and it’s fun to play with when all crunked. Can you shoot it into the night sky and point out stars like they say on the Bigha web site? Not in Brooklyn, you can’t, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you could somewhere with less light pollution. Is it really fun to shoot at the feet of the stoned skate rats who guard the doorway of their enclave at the end of the block? Yes, it sowed much confusion, and not a little discord. Is $120 a fair price for a laser? I have no idea, really. There’s not really a metric I can use to judge price with this one – I can’t even compare it to other green lasers, because as I said, I am recreational photon user, not a pro – so if you want a green laser, then I guess you’ll be paying $120.
And yes, that’s my cat. I guess that makes me a real blogger now.
Read – Product Page [Bigha]
Related
ThinkGeek Green Laser Pointer II Shamelessly Reviewed [Gizmodo]
https://gizmodo.com/thinkgeek-green-laser-pointer-ii-shamelessly-reviewed-17386
