Anywhere Light Goes™ Blog
A blog about optical design, build, test and more.
Don’t Multiply MTFs (Unless You Know What You’re Doing)
If you have two optical systems and you’ve measured their individual MTFs, it can be tempting to think you can calculate the combined MTF of the two together. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always work. The modulation transfer function (MTF) of an image-forming optical system is a measure of how well that system transfers the contrast of an object to the contrast of an image. And, there are many situations in optical design where the object of one sub-system is the image formed by another. A common example is a telescope with an eyepiece. So, why not measure their MTFs individually to get the full system MTF? Have a look at the 10 mm focal length singlet in Figure 1. This lens...
Designing for Molded Glass Aspheres
In the world of optical design aspheric elements have been widely used for decades. The first commercial use of glass aspheric lenses was in cine lenses produced by Elgeet (now Navitar) in 1956. The venerable Polaroid Swinger (1965) and the following SX-70 (1972, shown below) used molded plastic lenses and were manufactured in millions of units. Today molded aspheric plastic lenses are in every cell phone. Figure 1 - Polaroid SX-70 camera An aspheric lens element is one where the surface form departs from a sphere. Aspheric lenses are more challenging to design, manufacture, and test - however they provide significant benefits that make them highly desirable to the optical designer. Aspheric lenses generate fewer aberrations (better image quality) while...
Product Development Strategies for Electro-Optical Systems – Fail Fast vs. Moonshot – Part II
Read Part 1 In our last post we highlighted product develop strategies for high-end optical subsystems. In this post we’ll move to the other extreme – ultra low-cost optics in mass produced systems. Consumer Grade Products To start, we should appreciate that while a mass market optical system may not have the performance of a DNA sequencer, the product development tradespace can be just as challenging. Optikos has regularly designed optical systems for toys; what could be simpler? Toys require next-to-nothing manufacturing costs, typically require compact packaging, must exhibit decent optical performance (better than you may think), and have to survive being thrown in the toy bin or run over by the Barbie 4-wheeler. In short, toys are not easy...
Product Development Strategies for Electro-Optical Systems – Fail Fast vs. Moonshot – Part I
If you work in product development you’ve heard the mantra “fail fast, fail early, fail often”, or similar. A novel goal, and great when building digital software products where iteration may take a matter of weeks or even days. However, how effective is this strategy in optical product development where custom optical components regularly exceed 12-week lead times and tens of thousands of dollars? No 3D printer exists for precision optics (yet). We might contrast fail fast with the “moonshot” approach – when you may have one chance for a successful product launch (literally). In spaceborne systems it is common to spend years on design and analysis, modeling validation, and build and test. For example, the James Webb Space Telescope...
Lens Element Pricing Benefits from Economies of Scale
Optikos buys a lot of lens elements and builds a lot of lenses. We use them in the engineering design and manufacturing work we do for clients—from prototype builds to long-run production volumes in the 10’s of thousands. Optikos production lenses. We’re a little different from other manufacturers—we don’t specialize in just infrared optics, or low-cost optics, or projection lenses, or any other specific market. We routinely purchase diamond turned plastic lenses, molded optics (glass and plastic), polished glass spheres and aspheres, doublets, triplets, cylinders, domes, IR lenses, UV optics, and so on. I’ve been tracking pricing from our quotes for a while now, and, while we won’t share all the details, I can share an overarching plot of lens...
