Noah Acres of Lucky Duck was very prompt in his reply to my email. It turns out that there is a happy ending. After checking the serial number of my laser to see what the actual tested power was, he wrote: *** "Chuck, We have that one tested on 2/15 at a little over 19mw. Normally they will vary about 10% depending on batteries, temperature, etc. I think it's more likely your older pointer is greater than 5mw. There really is no such thing as "factory tuned." It just means they tested their lasers and set aside the higher powered ones to sell for a bit more. When did you buy it? Up until about 2 years ago it was pretty common to find lasers that were way over powered (being 10mw or more). As manufacturing processes become more refined lasers turned out a lot closer to spec (the spec being exactly 5mw). It used to be where you might find a few 1mw and a few 20mw in the same batch and a lot more in the range between; but now they're all really close to 5mw. We actually set these to 20mw by design though. Thanks, Noah Acres Luckyduck.com" *** So, it would appear that my old faithful Beta pointer was in the 20mw range all along- no wonder I felt it superior to all other 5mw lasers I'd seen, it actually was- and that explains why the Beta and Ducky laser beams are identical in brightness. But of course had we done the laser test in 2005, we probably would have discovered that by now. Folks could have had a 20mw laser long before now; those of you who bought the Beta pointer should feel good that you were ahead of the trend in this instance. Don't feel cheated if you bought the Lucky Duck "20mw" unit, you got what you paid for, and for a little less money than the Beta. One more thing, Acres wrote in a prior email, in answer to my observation that the label didn't match the power rating of the laser: "There is a bit of difficulty in importing lasers greater than 5mw. To simplify things, we used the same 5mw labels as always, even though some are of greater strength." That seems a bit sketchy, but as long as the laser is really a 20mw unit, I'll accept an "eyewash" label. He's the one that has to deal with government import restrictions, not me. I still want to do the laser comparison test, anybody else? ________________________________________________________________________ AOL now offers free email to everyone. Find out more about what's free from AOL at AOL.com.