The most beautiful color is from tunable optical parametric amplifier:D But I guess it goes out of the question, so green color all the way 532 or 515 coz my eyes are most sensitive in that region.
I need it darn cheap so gas laser and all the other cool stuff like Nd:YAG, Ti:Al2O3 are out of the question.
I'm not going to do it blindly:] and yeah I will tell you how it went. Maybe if I will not be lazy I will even get a profile of the beam and measure the stability with ophire.
Have you had any experience with cheap china laser, are they stable? It doesn't matter for me if the output is very low all I need is stable intensity, coherent light source. Any suggestions are welcome. P.S. I would prefer red or green.