60w from Automation Technologies

[David Somers]

The one thing I have done to improve very small lettering is to go through the process of changing my lettering from a raster letter to a vector only letter that is eventually center lined. (basically Corel outlines your letter with a hairline vector and then fills it with raster to create a solid letter) You can only get so small with that approach. For what that is worth. Changing it like this is tedious at best. But it does help with small stuff. I would hate to have to do this with a teeny tiny copy of War and Peace however.

[David Somers]

Sorry....Having one of those CRS days. Couldn't remember the name for the type of font I just described. But it just came to me. Called a Single Line Vector Font or a Stick Font. If you thought of it as being a vector font like I descrived above, but with a single line running through the center you would have the idea. There are singleline font generators on the web you can access for little $$ or for free. See if that helps.

[Jerome Stanek]

I guess what I am saying is that 2mm will be just a hair over 1/16 of an inch tall

[Bert Kemp]

The letters I engraved are 2 mm tall and they are legible. I didn't think we could have so much controversy over 2 mm text

I guess what I am saying is that 2mm will be just a hair over 1/16 of an inch tall

[Kev Williams]

Font size entered and ACTUAL size engraved aren't the same--- HOWEVER, Arial and some other fonts are VERY close in relation to point size vs actual size (when moving decimal points). Example, using 24 point Arial, the letters A, B and D come out to .239" tall, and C comes out to .247" tall. But that's just ARIAL. It's all 'font dependent' and all font's vary.

But know this, do NOT trust Corel's "inch" based font sizes. The same Arial ABD and C charcters entered at .25" actually measures only .179" and .185" respectively--
that's more than a 25% (over 1/16") size reduction even on the larger rounded letters!

This pic below is of the job I laid out to engrave that piece of wood. I resized all the lines of lettering to exactly what is shown by entering the exact height I wanted into the 'size' box.
You can see I chose the one line of 1.5mm high text. For reference, 1.5mm = .059"
Note the displays circled in red, the point size is listed as 4.53. I would have expected point size to be closer to 5.9 to match the inch size, but the ratio fell quite a bit with the reduction in font size, from 24 to 4.5 points...
Note the 'actual' size circled on the left is 1.501mm--- This IS the font's actual size, and is what the laser engraved.

Not shown, I changed the text size unit from 'point' to 'inch' just to see, and it shows the text size to be .082". That's not even close to the .059" actual text size--

you MUST use the size box to know what your ACTUAL text size is!

[Tim Elmore]

The machines they have for the most part are still in a box, the ones they have on the Showroom floor I would assume are for display only. I purchased one from them a couple years ago and sold when I purchased my ULS and it worked fine. I have autofocus on the one I have now, never used. John can be a little surly at times, especially when you have a problem.

Would agree with this. I bought from AT, happy with the machine but when the tube failed at 11 months it was a big hassle to get a warranty replacement - even though the website said 1 year warranty when I bought it. He sent a 2 year old tube as the "warranty replacement", with corrosion on the terminals. There website has since been updated to be a 3 months tube warranty, last I checked.

Aside from that, happy with the machine itself. Easily 2000+ hours on it. GWeike 6040N.

[Bill George]

When you always buy the cheapest and shop the same way your a sitting duck for the cheap CR@P coming out of China and a lot of it is sold on EBay. Those folks always come here to ask, why does my cheap laser not work??
There are Good Chinese lasers being sold and some sold with USA support but they don't make your buy list... then good luck. There are used made in USA used machines on the market and they are being compared with the lowest of the low Chinese lasers. Check with your local Trotec, Epilog and ULS dealer for trade ins.