It’s that time again – time to head to your doctor’s office for a checkup. You arrive and a medical assistant calls you to the back. Before your doctor comes in, you have your blood pressure checked, your heart rate measured, temperature taken, and maybe even have some blood drawn. These are part of a vitals check that provides data to your doctor so they can interpret the findings and help determine your care plan. At IQ Lab™ Services, our team performs similar vitals checks, but for cameras and lenses. These observations and data points are what help our metrology experts view the system holistically.
We refer to this lens vitals check as the IQ Lab Measurement Suite. Depending on your “symptoms” our team may prescribe different tests to help the metrology experts create a diagnosis and recommended enhancement plan if necessary.
The IQ Lab measurements test for:
- – Modulation Transfer Function (MTF): Measures how well a lens captures contrast
- – Focal Length Distortion: When an image appears warped, exaggerating straight lines into a curved appearance or makes objects appear closer together.
- – Field Curvature: An effect that causes objects in an image to appear sharp in some areas and blurry in others.
- – Chief Ray Angle: The angle at which light enters an optical system from an off-axis object point
- – Chromatic Aberration: A failure to focus that causes colors to split off or be focused in the wrong areas.
- – Relative Illumination: Determines the relative brightness across an entire projected image
+Many other conditions
Once given the results, it’s time to speak with our optical engineers. If they find anything abnormal, they may recommend changes to the design or manufacturing process. Because Optikos has both metrology (aka measurement) and engineering (aka design) teams, it means you get to stay within the same “hospital” for your lens care plan.
When is it time for a checkup?
Some folks may ask, how do you know its time for a checkup? If you’ve ordered lenses elsewhere, sometimes, you may hear from an end-user that your product with an optical component isn’t working as expected. Other times, you may check things out in your lab and find that your output isn’t what you expected after ordering from a vendor.
If you’ve modeled your lenses in house, maybe there’s a blurriness in unexpected areas of the output. We’ve seen customers where the colors were splitting towards the edges where blues, reds, greens are all in different spots than they should be. Other customers find that the illumination is inconsistent with darkness around the edges when looking through their microscope system.
Customers ask – did I build my system wrong? Am I using the wrong illumination? Are the optics wrong? The IQ Lab can answer these questions and then give a treatment plan for how to make the adjustments necessary to achieve your intended results.
Preventative Care
If you are not someone that wants to wait for something to go wrong, you can join the IQ Lab customers that use our suite of services more as preventative care. Experienced manufacturers know to check their prototypes or batches of optical components before assembly. And if this level of production requires frequent testing, you may even consider adding the same metrology tools we utilize in your own facilities. It’s like purchasing a specialized, dedicated care team that can be customized to your frequent symptoms.
Those tools include:
- – OpTest® and LensCheck™ measurement systems for small to large optics
- – The Meridian® family of camera testing for short focal length and small aperture cameras
- – ColliMeter™ 50 and ColliMeter™ 350 to determine the apparent distance of a projected object
- – Optikos SMI to measure shape deviations of precision surfaces such as ball optics and contact lenses
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There’s nothing better than a clean bill of health. To get help diagnosing your symptoms, get in touch with our metrology team. We’re looking forward to connecting with you and creating the best care plan for your project.
