Hi Sam,
I thought, after my post, that I must get around to laser etching the Wile.E, Acme rocket and Roadrunner that you coded - it's in the pipeline.
Lower power CO2 lasers will not etch into metals (it's a wavelength thing) but they are brilliant at ablating the dye layer in anodized ally (probably why they are used so much for tattoo removals).
Art went to a lot of trouble for us last November (even though he was really busy with Gearotic Motion) to correct a couple of errors which had been left in the Impact/Laser plugin and now this works really well for raster work.
I am sure you have seen this before but this was done on the rear of an old anodized panel and there is room for improvement but it is perhaps a good example of what can easily be achieved.
Art's plugin accepts .bmp and .jpg formats, allows scaling, inverse image, setting Y step over etc etc and I think I have shown that the results produced rival the low to middle price range commercial laser packages and Art says he only coded this plugin as a fun thing in the first place.
Tweakie.