JPT MOPA M7 100W lens recommendation

I have a 300x300mm FL420, a 175x175mm FL254, and a 70x70mm FL100. That set seems like a decent spread for me (although the middle one could go a bit either way – it just came with the machine as a default).

The FL100 is plenty tight to pack a punch on small parts (e.g. coin blanks).

The FL420 is plenty wide to handle the big stuff like square-foot tiles, and with enough depth of focus to handle the compound curves of Contigo travel mugs in a rotary.

Most of the time, however, I’m just using the FL254, as it’s in the goldilocks zone. It’s got enough depth of field to play with natural items like rocks. It’s got enough usable area to handle most things I tend to work on. And it’s tight enough to pack a decent punch.

If you’re doing serial production of large numbers, having the smallest lens that covers your use case may be able to shave enough time off each job to add up over many runs. For general experimentation, on the other hand, having one less lens makes me happy. If I’m doing something that needs my short punchy lens or my wide reachy lens, I go for the appropriate lens. For everything else, I have one less variable to deal with: power, speed, interval, frequency, pulse length, but not which lens to choose.