Also do it when nobody else is around.

Also give eye protection to literally everyone else who might be standing anywhere in the reflective range of the cover, lens, mirrors, and any shiny metallic objects. These lasers can do damage before you even blink.

e: This includes non-human animals as well. If you're okay with potentially blinding a bunch of innocent corvids I guess that's on you.

I have often wondered how effective it'd be to just use a spraypaint canister on a pole.

Also, dont bring a phone with, at all. Or anyone else. Or any Bluetooth devices. Bad opsec can lead to bad outcomes.

Yeah, I certainly wasn't saying these would be hard to get. And yeah, a lot of cheap laser pointers are also dangerous. What I'm saying is basically, "Hey, this is potentially dangerous, read up on this before you reach for your credit card."

And there's lots where they use frequency doubling to make the laser light while having very poor filtering. Meaning that not only is the visible part of the light very dangerous, but the invisible light (which may have unpredictable patterns) can be even higher wattage and far more dangerous because you don't even know its there.

Damn, that's a big number

1000000μW!

0.7376 ft lbf/s (foot pounds-force per second)

It just rolls off your tongue!

It sounds exactly as cool as it is. 1000mW reads as 10^3 ×10^(-3)W, which reads pretty pointless. At some point in science you just write everything in scientific notation and remove the multipliers altogether.

medical (I guess it’s in the range for tattoo removal, but power rating for these lasers are stated weirdly)

for those curious (you probably know this though), lots of these are pulsed, primarily to avoid excessive local heating (burning) of the tissue being lased. these can have peak powers in the kilowatt range!

watts are energy (in joules) divided by time (in seconds), and while relating energy to time is helpful for constant-power applications—and even some certain pulsed applications—the timeframe here is often small to the point of not mattering much, and a direct measure of the total energy delivered is ultimately most useful. nonetheless they are very impressive sounding and goofy, like "oh i work with multi-KILOwatt lasers on the daily :3" hehe

any kind of pointing, besides cases where you wish to permanently damage your audience.

for a single one watt beam of light, absolutely! do not bring those to the school show-and-tell. but there are absolutely lasers this (or even more) powerful used in concert settings and so forth. still, you're very right, care must be taken with them too.

also your point of output contamination is spot on! +1 to avoiding cheap "powerful" lasers :)

Any idea where the quality is appropriate for the task? Like a $300 range or like a $2k range?

Try walking with a pebble in your shoe. That'll change your gait and its not something you're faking so it doesn't require focus to maintain.

The camera doesn’t see 360 degrees, just sayin’