Smoke & Mirrors

Very entertaining!! I think most Sharper Image products carried a very high profit margin. I do like the effect however, especially the colours.. I wonder if the gaps in the lissajou figure were caused by the colour wheel or camera artefacts.. I also I wonder if YT's copyright algorithm could identify music based on the buzzing sounds ;-)

I recall lusting after this as a boy but never had one, thanks for showing me what I missed! I think it's pretty cool but the price is...mmmmm.... ambitious?

I had this as a kid!! I loved laser shows and other psychedelic video art, so I used it quite a bit, but even I had to admit it was pretty lame. Also there must’ve been some heavy discounts on it somewhere, because there is NO WAY my parents would’ve paid $199 for this.

Simple device with a very effective result! Overpriced though. Anyway the Atari Video Music "emulator project" is on the way, now i have all the components and software. I'm assembling it, i hope to obtain something that work. I will inform you :-)

I guessed $199 as soon as you introduced it! Sharper Image stuff was mostly overpriced with poor build quality. That being said... I enjoyed the laser light show at amusement parks as a kid and now I want one of these.

But the way it says Laser Laser Laser Laser Laser (not a laser) shows some balls.

Remembering whirling a flashlight around a dark room, A kid at the time interested in the speed of light.

I was all prepared to say "hey that's actually not bad" until you said the price. Yikes! That's some very cheap plastic tat for a very un-cheap price.

Thoroughly enjoyed, Mat. Thanks for cracking open obscure tech as always. (Yes, surprisingly effective!)

If I remember correctly, in the 1980s the drug cocaine was still popular, and the 'price' from Time magazine at the time was about $100 a gram. No, they didn't sell many of these to teenagers, but probably to people who threw wild parties where $100 was tipping money. I wonder how many warranty cards were ever sent in? Like, with real names and addresses.

That's really neat! 😀

Nice effect, maybe worth the money if you were a DJ or something. The other question is how reliable would it have been, from new?

I have to say, I really do like that effect, but $200 is quite steep!

Jeepers, you could have bought a NES for the same money in 1988. Talk about pricing yourself out of the market. Let me think, Nintendo or squiggly lines on the wall?

Another excellent video. Thank you! :-)

The effect is pretty good, and while no Laser Dock, at least it is extremely responsive to the music. Unlike a lot of these plastic fantastic devices it actually does deliver. Extremely overpriced for what you get though. However, it does looks like it could be a nice home project to build something similar out of a torch, some lego and a speaker.

wow love your presentation and style in this new video! I also thought the device was very impressive.

It seems you were pretty excited about this one given how fast the reading of the box went. Either that or you know what you were in for and just wanted it done with.

As someone else said above, this is solving a long time mystery for me! And I have to say, 30 years too late or not, I am completely satisfied! I always wonder, who were the people that would spend $200 on that in 1988 and the best answer I can come up with is Patrick Bateman from “American Psycho.” He could afford it easily and would enjoy the light show when not committing murder. Mat, you are my absolute favorite. When I get an alert on my phone, I always say to my girlfriend, “There’s a new Techmoan!”

You really should mail off that product registration card ... (:>)

Another wonderfully informative video of a tech from my youth! What's just occurred to me is that another reason for loving the channel is that your ending music reminds me so much of the introduction music from the seminal Carl Sagan series " Cosmos" which I adored in the 1980s! Coincidence? Anyway, keep up the good work, best of British, and thanks for reading!

This is one of the rare cases in which you actually showcase something I own! I understand you're on your next project now, but for the sort of nerd who enjoys this sort of thing (me), there's more to see: The difference between a sine wave and a square wave is significant and reproducible. And if you view a song like "Solsbury Hill" by Peter Gabriel in which each stanza is played with different instruments, each stanza has a distinct and recognizable underlying pattern although the behavior of the device is otherwise fairly consistent throughout the track. If you spend a little time playing with different inputs and noises, it can be a bit fascinating, though probably no more fascinating than watching music on a real oscillogram.

Oh man, you solved a mystery for me, I saw these advertised and always wondered. (And, I remember seeing LASER light shows, at LASER light shows)

Edit': Sorry, posted in the wrong post! :)

I think seeing the effect in stereo might actually be interesting. I thought the effect was not that much worse than the sillyness of a real Lazer light show.

Whilst the build quality is poor, I like the ingenuity of very simple parts to create something like this in the 1980s. A modern equivalent would be far less interesting to pull apart. I loved the comments about the warranty card. I’m always tempted to send them off when I find an ancient card in an old product just to see what sort of confusion it causes..

I have one of those! My sister gave it to me when she got bored with it

Fabulous video, Mat. I am surprised and disappointed that there isn't a real laser in there. I wonder why we can see multiple coloured squiggles on the screen at the same time? Is that due to our persistence of vision? Presumably only one light ray at a time is going through the colour wheel unless there's also a prism of some sort between the bulb and the colour wheel to send multiple light rays through different parts of the wheel at the same time.

It's brittle, completely overpriced and made of plastic; I love it - but your review is better 👍

Honestly, after the Mirror Incident, I wasn't expecting much but once you repaired it and cleaned it up ... and put it in a dark space with a good screen ... it worked pretty well. I would say it truly was laser like. The color wheel must spin quickly, since it appeared that all colors were present at once and the lensing must really focus it as it was quite well-defined. I'm not enough of a music nut to have bought one (but I loved the Sharper Image catalogs, too, BITD) but I don't think I'd have been too disappointed with this.

Its a truly analogue device... The Idea is pretty cool, but they should have sold it as something you have to put together yourself, like a 3D puzzle.

It would probably be a cool audio electronics project to build something similar from a kit or from scratch.

I think it's elegant in its simplicity. A high price was probably because of expected low volumes (you still have to pay for the fixed cost of plastic moulds etc...). But it's surprisingly effective. Nice product and video!

I swear Mat, you are the only reviewer who would have caught the mirror failure on camera. The others would be looking at the pretty colors and moaning in appreciation. Honestly though, with your 'smoke and mirrors' title for this one, I was expecting some kind of catastrophic failure to spce things up.

Great video. I thought of a new strapline for the channel: "Techmoan: buying crap from Ebay - so you don't have to!"

I'd have been very impressed if I saw this in someone's house in 1988. I didn't have high hopes for it, but it's a neat effect.

Another great one! Also, new specs? Lookin good!!

I'd seen the advert back in the day and was confused how they'd got a coloured laser beam considering that red was really the only affordable one at the time. I'm so glad you took it apart. As soon as you said it wasn't a real laser, I just knew it'd be a focused light, crappy colour wheel and a mirror attached to a transducer. Although, they probably just used a broken speaker and cut the cone back. I wonder if there is a suitable LED replacement lamp? I also wonder what would happen if you shone a laser pointer down it instead.

Interesting to see the insides and how it worked.

"...contains flashing images". Sad that content producers need to announce that these days. But it was topped by a show that used the announcement "Could contain sudden changes and excitement". And they did not mean that as a joke.

looks like you got an early screensaver there. :-)

I think it looks pretty cool, especially the colours (colors for The 8-Bit Guy there ;-)), but yes, $200 is definitely too much...

I actually like the effect!

At the risk of damning with faint praise, I'll call this device, "Not Uninteresting." While it might have livened up the party a bit back in 1988, you could probably find better ways to liven it up for your $200. As always, your presentation here is most definitely interesting.

I can understand now why "PATENT PENDING" is on the box. LOL I am fascinated by the simplicity of that NON-LASER device. 90% of the price comes probably from the word LASER and FX stands presumably for fix it. Thanks for sharing. If you ever get bored of it, you could design a new pattern for that wheel. ;-)

This actually looked better than I imagined, it will get annoying quite quickly though I'd assume. Would have been great for kids but with that price I don't think many people got this for Christmas. Awesome to hear a bit of glitch hop by the way :D, also a great way to play copyrighted music ;)

I cracked up at your mocking tone: "Oh can I get 'round the back of your hifi and wire my laser projector in?" because it sounds exactly like the kind of thing I'd say at a party.

Thanks Mat. I really liked the video.

Actually, the device is pretty neat. I think it looks pretty cool, actually. However, I agree it's not worth $200, which would be considerably more in today's money if you take inflation into account.

I'm kind of impressed the rubber bandy things hadn't perished.

Cool vidéo! 😃 Even if it is a quite simple mechanism , it is quite ingenious in my opinion, I would’ve loved to have something like this when I was a kid !😃

Thanks! Hope you're feeling better!