I told the lady from SDlaser that I’m not interested in an official quote as yet, but first wanted to find out how to drive the LEP-unit properly, and collect funds for it (as in: until I’m prepared to sink large sums of money in my hobby again 
)
I spoke to an employee at Light Fair and played with the demos they had there. They are currently selling direct to a few big customers but expect to be in distribution eventually with a component cost of about $50. 6500K only (it’s a phosphor limitation, you can’t really get any red in there with such a high flux density). They’re based on 450nm laser diodes which is the same technology as the 1/2/4W blue lasers that have been popping up in recent years - not too complicated to drive and pretty forgiving of imperfect electronics. There are two of the laser diodes in the package that fire down at 45 degrees onto the phosphor.
That sounds promising!
Put seven of these into a bigger host and things get interesting!
There used to be a BLF development fund. We may try to restart it though we would need to make sure it doesn’t end up the way the previous did.
I believe such assurance is possible to make…
We only need to maintain a pair of trusted BLFers holding the keys.
When one disappears, the other changes the keys and shares them with one another.
2 is a number large enough to reasonably rule out simultaneous disappearance yet small enough to to reasonbly believe the trust won’t be breached.
As to technical issues - there are many handheld lasers available. The laser community figured them out.
I believe we can learn from them….and while I still don’t have any idea of how to cool them down I believe it’s possible to do it well enough.
Actually I have a hunch that “well enough” is significantly more than 50 °C. 
This stuff is pretty exciting. You say it's like 2000s LEDs, so I think about what LEP will do in 15 years.
I get that the stuff is big money. The automobile industry (for headlights) is obvious, but so many applications would love efficient lux. If you can start replacing short-arcs in any application, there's reasons to pay for it. Smaller size, decreased power, increased longevity, decreased complexity...
I can't wait until Enderman gets his hands on one.
Read that NDA very carefully before you confirm or deny…
Yes correct, the datasheet that was sent to me had a different first picture but the rest is the same.
I think the most imporatnt thing here is how this one behaves in subzero temperatures, my experience with lazers and subzero temps isnt good
Hey, I already have one of this, but, can’t talk about it, sry 
But seriously, this sounds interesting.
I had several damaged lazer genetics( the big ones) and i played a while with those for a month or so but sub zero temps are a pain…and combined with a heavy recoil: voila, problems 
Yet, i ve found a nichia green lazer that works but the price became terrible
Once I tried to repair ND30, that thing is PITA…
That's a teaser, not a real datasheet. All the important info (thermal, emission angle diagram etc., solder footprint, isolated thermal pad?) is missing.
…hence the nda I guess. But if the expectation is that it will eventually be sold for 50 dollar, that is another reason to not buy a sample and just wait for things to happen
Did you know that Lasercomponents resell these or that they sell the Albalux white fibre coupled laser? https://www.lasercomponents.com/fileadmin/user_upload/home/Datasheets/sld-laser/laserlight-smd.pdf
https://www.lasercomponents.com/uk/product/albalux-fiber-coupled-module/
Nice article about this technology by Nakamura (SLD is his company) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-15/the-headlight-of-the-future-is-a-laser
I did some searching on what do Laser pointer people do to keep their diodes cool.
I’m only scratching the surface but what I’ve seen so far looks unimpressive:
Get a huge host with lots of copper inside. If the diode is still too powerful, don’t run it continuously.
And they typically run less powerful diodes.
F.e. this is a highly rated host that can handle 3.5W (actually 7W at 50% duty cycle):
Note that the SLD LEP runs 14.3W…
See, the problem with most laser pointers is that the heat dissapation design is absolute crap.
Not only is the thermal design of the pointers themselves bad, but the way laser diodes are manufactured, thermal resistance is quite high.
I still wonder why laser manufacturers haven’t standardized themselves on a standard 3030/3535 footprint.
I guess the reason for not doing this is not to make it easy for the public to acquire stupid powerful lasers.