Answering my own question from above, I got a chance to see an x-light V3 in action and I’ll share my thoughts on it here. I also tried out a Leica Thunder system and I’ll start a new thread about that.
The x-light I saw was attached to a Nikon TiE body being run by VisiView. This system had the LDI-7 from 89North which has 7 discreet channels. For whatever reason the 555 diode is larger and comes out of a separate fiber which is connected to the disk unit by a bifurcated fiber. The output at 470 is 1 watt which is definitely enough. The V3 has two camera ports. This unit had a single Hamamatsu Fusion attached.
The scope was run with VisiView which has really improved a lot since the last time I used it. All automatic functionality was there including things like sliding out the disk for WF mode or changing filters etc. I know that you can also run this with micro-manager. I believe that Nikon is going to support the V3 soon as well.
Image quality was great (see example below). I didn’t take a PSF on this system but the confocality was definitely up to the standard of what I expected to see. I didn’t see any immediate downside to this system; the demo was smooth. I did some photobleaching tests; it behaved as I would expect for a spinning disk. The field of view is also flat. I didn’t see any shading in my images.
I was expecting to see some major flaw since this spinning disk is considerably cheaper than others. It leaves me wondering why the system is so much cheaper. It may be that this disk doesn’t have microlenses. I presume they get over this by having the 1 watt laser. If I could have stayed longer I would have liked to measure how much light is lost through the disk optics.
Overall, I don’t have anything negative to say about the x-light V3 + LDI. It seems like a great spinning disk and laser combo.
Fun with the LDI!