Laser safety product compliance—Who cares?

The question of whether a laser that one purchases is compliant with laser product safety standards and whose job it is to confirm comes up regularly. Additionally, what should one look for to mitigate noncompliance risks and what recourse is available if there are deficiencies? The development of laser product safety standards is a very resource intensive activity, and a lot of highly qualified, busy experts volunteer significant amounts of time for this work. It would be reassuring to think that all these efforts are well spent and that laser products worldwide benefit from the clearly defined product safety performance requirement of these standards. But is this true? There is more to the story of standards compliance than simply producing a product safety standard. This work looks at who is or should be responsible for laser product compliance, how it is or should be achieved, who is or should be aware of the requirements, and finally looks at some product examples to see if it is being done.