Introduction

Everyone has a cool laser memory. If you are my age the most common is from the 1985 movie starring Val Kilmer titled Real Genius. One movie that has always stuck out in my mind was the 1997 film, Air Force One, where a marine uses a small hand held laser to melt the plastic covering to expose a wire. If you deal with electronics for a living, how handy would a tool like that be? Whether you want to admit it or not, chances are you have an attraction to lasers.

Wicked Lasers, long known for their ultra-powerful, compact and expensive lasers made mainstream news a few weeks ago by advertising the world's most powerful hand held laser. As if making a 1 watt laser wasn't enough to grab headlines, the media coverage soon turned into a frenzy when George Lucas thought the new Wicked Lasers S3 Arctic looked a little too much like the famous Light Sabers from Star Wars.

Today we are going to thumb our nose at George for his arrogance, check out the new Arctic 1 watt blue laser and see if we can burn some stuff!

Specifications, Pricing and Availability

Before we can get started setting things on fire, let's take a look at the specs and then get into some safety tips that will keep you from seeing blue for two days.

The S3 Series is the world's first 1 watt consumer laser. The beam emitted is a deep shade of cobalt blue and as you will see later in this article, it can be seen a long way from the source. Wicked is claiming a battery life of 120 minutes before charging is needed and luckily for us the S3 comes with a handy charger, so you will have not be cycling through double A batteries every 15 minutes.

Just as impressive as the laser beam is the housing it comes from. Wicked Lasers came up with an aluminum case that not only looks military grade, but it is truly military grade. Built into the lasers housing is a new feature that Wicked is calling a Smart Switch. This will keep your laser safe from accidental discharge if it were to fall into the wrong hands.

At the launch Wicked Lasers advertised the S3 Arctic with a 199 USD price point, but the demand was so great that they needed to raise the price to 299 USD. It also might have been the money needed to pay all of those lawyers to fight the Lucas lawyers, but either way it went, you are going to have to shell out 299 Dollars to get the world's more powerful handheld laser.