After getting some great results engraving photos onto 5x7 black marble my brother picked up for me on Ebay, I received my first order of Lasersketch marble yesterday. The cheap "Ebay" tiles engraved well, but many pieces had some white veins in them, so I was really looking forward to receiving the Lasersketch product.
First I tried engraving the LS marble with the same settings I had been using on the "cheap" tiles, (40 speed/80 power 600 dpi on my 30 watt Explorer). The results were terrible with no detail, and a dark silver/gray light areas. I then tried settings suggested in earlier posts on this forum and got some fairly good detail, but the LS marble just does not have the black/white contrast to produce a good photo engraving. No matter what settings I used, the dark silver/gray was the lightest engraving the LS marble would reveal. I had also previously picked up a few marble floor tiles from a local Home Depot, and they engraved the same as the LS marble (no contrast). Pictures posted by Laura and others looked great on Lasersketch marble. I guess it is just hit or miss on whether you get a good "laserable" batch from Lasersketch?
Keith had mentioned Color Stone as a marble supplier in an earlier post. Is their marble more consistantly "laserable"? It seems so far that some white veining in the marble may indicate that it will engrave with more black/white contrast.
I'm going to call Lasersketch today and see if they can educate me a little about the properties of marble.