Anywhere Light Goes™ Blog
A blog about optical design, build, test and more.
Pitfalls in Selecting LEDs for Quantitative Devices
In the world of visible light sources, it’s hard to beat light emitting diodes (LEDs). These tiny emitters are mass produced in countless varieties of color and intensity, making them the obvious choice for a device that requires a lot of light at specific wavelengths. Often there are dozens of candidates that would produce acceptable performance. Some applications, however, push the envelope either by maximizing throughput, multiplexing via coexisting spectral channels, or coupling the light into finicky optical elements. In these cases, the LED can become a performance limiter, making it critical to select the best LED for the device. Now we have a problem: LEDs are advertised primarily for the enormous market of general lighting. This use case has...
Lensless Imaging – Hype or the Future?
Optikos touts ourselves as the Optical Engineering Experts™, so it’s always interesting when a customer approaches us to remove optics from their system! We’ve had a variety of interested parties engage Optikos about lensless imaging. This is a novel approach to imaging that removes the optical lens, while still generating high quality images using computational photography. So how does this work? Lensless imaging seeks to collect phase and amplitude information from an object or scene, and then recreate the scene from that information. The most approachable method may be digital holographic imaging. In this scheme a coherent optical beam is reflected off of, or passes through, an object of interest. The incident beam diffracts off the object and interferes with...
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...
