60Watt lightbulb vs
60 Watt laser
Most people will remember the old incandescent lightbulb and will remember that 30 Watts was easy on the eyes, 60 Watts the standard and 100 Watts was for the garage.
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Silly but logical, people started associating Watts with the amount of light. Everybody knows it should be Lumen. Or Lux. Or Candela. Or Foot-Candles. (no joke)
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LED's made that impossible, being 10 times more efficient. This particular foto shows 5.7 Watt consumption, while illuminating for 40 Watt.
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Lasers break the game entirely. A 60 Watt laser uses 450 Watts and produces kiloWatts of light.
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The explanation
It comes all down to what is being measured. The incandescent bulb tells the power being consumed from the socket. We all know that the efficiency was terrible, only 5% of all that energy was converted to light.
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LED's convert around 40% to light, almost a factor of 10 more efficient. And manufactures started promoting 'lumen' to tell the public how bright it was. Since no one ever used lumen this was a pickle and for now the old Wattage can still be found on packaging as a reference point. One day this icon will receive the same faith as the floppy disk, kids only know it as the 'save-button'.
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Watts in lasers
Lasers promote their luminous power, not their power consumption. A 60 Watts laser will produce 60 Watts of light, while drawing much more from the socket.
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An old 60 Watt lightbulb should say, at 5% efficiency, '3 Watts'. But that would result in a major scare when receiving the electricty bill for that 3 Watts lightbulb.
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In order to keep everybody as happy as possible you'll find almost all options on a laser. The input of the whole module is 48 Watt, the input for just the laser is around 16 Watts.
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The amount of light is 'just' 5,5 Watts.
W(h)att is the difference?
why isn't it a problem to illuminate your room with a 5.5 Watt LED, but you'll get major warning signs on a 5.5 Watt laser?
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It all has to do with light intensity. An LED spreads out that 5.5 Watts of light energy to illuminate an entire room. A well callibrated laser dumps that 5.5 Watts into a tiny spot of only 50um diameter; 0.05mm!
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This is the reason why the legal EU-limit for using lasers without protection, i.e. laserpointers and cat toys, is just a single milliWatt.
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But since everyone has just 2 eyes, regard any laser as unsafe and never look right into one.