What are a ‘typical’ steps in lens design ?
Overview OFH works on many different types of projects, each with its unique goals and deliverables. For illustration, here is a breakdown of a lens design project from 2012. Our client produced a very low cost diagnostic microscope to view saliva with 30x magnification. They came to OFH to help them design a new product […]
Tessar Lens Design
Among the many lens design configurations, one of the most common lens optical layouts is the Tessar Lens. This layout was created by Paul Rudolph in 1902 for photographic lenses. In the golden age of film photography, the Tessar configuration was widely used in common lenses such as the f 50mm/f2.8 As with any photographic […]
How Aspheric and Freeform lenses work
A key aspect of an optical product development is the creation of a quality optical system design optimized to reduce aberrations and system cost. In an attempt to reach a balance between cost and performance, optical designers have created lenses with different shapes that help reduce aberrations. Traditionally, optical elements have radial symmetry: they are […]
3 Strategies for Field Lens Development and Design
Field lenses are a basic element in optical design, to understand their role in an optical system it’s important first to understand the definitions of Field-of-View (FOV). Generally speaking, FOV is the maximum size of an object that an optical system can create an image of. The FOV is related to the size of the […]
Benefits of Zemax’s Black Box Lenses
When integrating off the shelf lenses into optical systems, it is essential to have full information about how a lens will perform with other elements in the system. When multiple component vendors ( ie electronics, mechanical, optical) are involved, data needs to be shared without revealing key intellectual property. The information found on a traditional […]
Powell Lens Design
Previous posts have reviewed different techniques for beam homogenization as well as the difference between spot size and beam angle. This post will review a method for beam shaping using Powell Lenses. Powell lenses are lenses that create a straight laser line by dispersing, in a controlled way, an input collimated beam. They were first […]