I am really fearful of this thread devolving to something with nationalistic overtones , so lets not really go there
I will just give my take on things as I saw them in China as to how stuff is "cheap"
its not underpaid overexploited workers and a govt sponsored low exchange rate entirely, IMO its a huge combination of factors , the cost of living there is cheap , expectation of labour is not as high as in western countries , the state promotes business and builds fantastic infrastructure for manufacturing and business , the economys of scale are enormous , there are very few middlemen , work ethic and productivity are high and so on. They pay the same for their imported commodities that we in the west do , they just convert them a lot more efficiently.
Yes , there are inequities compared to highly sophisticated western norms , but nothing worse than in my country or india. Never saw the type of slums and beggars/vagrants etc that I see here and other places
The only thing that really bothered me in China was the level of pollution , even driving out 100 miles into some rural areas , there is a miasma of grey mist , its pollution.
The govt are clamping down big time on those that refuse to see to the safety of workers , draconian penalties are implemented , like 20 years in Jail etc.
Anyway , thats besides the point , one has to do as ones conscience dictates as to purchasing and it's admireable that there are folks out there who will support their industry/country by buying locally. We have the same problem over here in SA with a number of industrys , like clothing. cheap chinese imports are doing the local industry in , the consumers are driving this tho. globalisation is great in some respects but really bad in others.
Getting back to the lasers , as Dan so rightly points out , workflow is a pretty vital part of the picture and over the last few days , we have been experimenting with this as well as putting the driver thru it's paces. In common with a LOT of lasers , the intricacies and vagaries of the driver have not been explained in the nth degree of depth and it has taken quite a bit of time and head scratching to work out where we have gone wrong and what does what and what affects what...
Albeit you can work directly from corel, autocad (and now Cadian with the new software) , it still is somewhat of a kludge solution as all the cad packages port in one way or another to Laserworks or RDcad (diff name , same package) . By far the better way to work is to use Corel to design , export to ai and open laserworks and control the laser from there.
The fly in the ointment is that most lasers will have a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) interface from corel , IE whats on screen will engrave as you see it. Its not the same with these lasers as they do not see , for eg , a line with width as having width. ANY closed object is treated as a solid filled object in this driver and lines cannot be "rastered" as they will all be hairlines. It will give an error if you say to process a line in scan mode.
So if you want lines with thickness , you need to use Corel to convert object to outline and use that .. alternatively , it's pretty easy to convert the graphic to a high res bitmap and then just engrave that. Its no issue to have cutting and bitmaps and vector entities in the lasers driver and to process various colours or layers all in one go.
At the end of it all , all the lasers we use DO convert to 1 bit bitmaps when doing scanning , all lasers are actually a "dot matrix" printers in scan mode.
The laserworks design package supplied with the machine is pretty much ok , good for designing simple stuff so Corel should still be the design interface. The driver that controls the laser is very powerful , far more powerful than any I have come across. Just about everything is configurable and you can do some amazing stuff with it.
To put it in a nutshell , one can change your design philosophy in Corel to cope with this machine or just use the "old" way and have to do a further conversions for really complex cdrs. What really worked well was converting greyscale etc via Photograv , the driver itself has various types of conversion , but photograv works exceptionally.
I am not concerned at the change of workflow , there are some amazing features that will cut down seriously on processing time that will more than compensate.
We design on Corel for our CnC router and we need to do similar conversions for lines with thickness - so it's no biggie.
We have discovered some REALLY great features , for eg
You can give it a material size and it will self array a single element or group to most effectively fill the size of material available
It is real easy to set the order of cuts or layers or even entities it cuts/engraves first
Optimisation is stunning , you can actually tell the software to simulate the laser head path and amend it if you wish , it does a sterling job automagically of cutting down engraving time
You can compensate for kerf width inwards or out
It has a trace function for black and white bitmaps as well as a scanner interface
It has a "dot" cut function , IE you can cut a line using dots- you can configure the dot time , the dot length and the distance between dots , IE set up a very delicate PPI or dashed perforation , will be very good for wood to minimise charring
You have many options where to start the engraving relative to absolute home and from which point in the graphic to start engraving and where to end once it finishes
If your power goes off in the middle of a job , when you power up the machine , it asks whether you want to carry on the job where it got disrupted
You can get the co ordinates of the head at any position
You can pause the job and jog the head away and it comes back to where it was on resume
There is a pen up function , IE it can move the table down when it starts automatically and raise it up at a certain point , to clear lips on deep dishes etc. You can set this manually and allow the machine to read the various co ordinates and path and it stores this!!
There is an autofocus option
It has a stamp mode
It has a quasi 3d mode
You can set ramp speed , acceleration when no laser is firing and when it fires and compensate for any backlash
It has a job estimator , in terms of time , before you do anything.
It also reports total x distance travelled , Y distance , total time on , total laser time and so on.
You can download your files to the laser and run it stand alone - also use a flash disk or a HD
You can set both speeds and power very easily on the fly
It has a function that can either dot all 4 corners of the extents of a graphic before or after it engraves it, it can do a dry run of the extents or you can tell it to cut the extents (a rectangle surrounding the engraved graphic) and tell it how much white space you want it to leave.
You can order the direction of the cut, not just the order and define the start point of a cut.
You can tell it to start the cut outside the element to be cut or inside it , for eg if you want an absolutely perfect circle , you tell it to start the cut on the sheet outside of the circle and to cut the circle , without any start or endpoint notches. Vice versa if you want a perfect hole
You can raster in the X and Y direction , ie left to right and top to bottom , you can choose to fire bidirectionally and unidirectionally in both modes
You can raster bottom to top or vice versa
You can tell the machine that you have some sort of feeder and set all sorts of feeder parameters.
You can tell it to close all unclosed curves where endpoints are a certain distance from one another and to conver any entity that is lines into a closed curve and set the smoothness of that curve
You can use ACAD SHX fonts (lots of single lines here)
You can engrave a vector graphic and tell it to cut the outlines (or vector engrave at high speed to clean up edges)
It has a cluster mode where small spread out elements will be done one at a time instead of sweeping the whole graphic left and right.
You can delete overlaps , so if you are cutting a matrix of rectangles , it will delete all overlapping lines if you stack em with all the sides touching each other , ie it wont cut rectangle after rectangle , it will only cut coincident lines once , a huge time saver.
There are many more "features" , we have yet to discover what they all do...
Bad thing with our machines is you can run em open , they didnt come with safety interlocks albeit the mainboard has a function to use em , when my staff uses the machines , i will install the safety mag switches.
The exhaust of the lasers is really really VERY good , even if you have the door open , the smoke dissapears , you have to loook closely to see if the machine is actually engraving as there is no smoke - it's whipped out .
Rodney Gold, Toker Bros trophies, Cape Town , South Africa :
Roland 2300 rotary . 3 x ISEL's ..1m x 500mm CnC .
Tekcel 1200x2400 router , 900 x 600 60w Shenui laser , 1200 x 800 80w Reci tube Shenhui Laser
6 x longtai lasers 400x600 60w , 1 x longtai 20w fiber
2x Gravo manual engravers , Roland 540 large format printer/cutter. CLTT setup
1600mm hot and cold laminator , 3x Dopag resin dispensers , sandblasting setup, acid etcher