A blog about optical design, build, test and more.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. We’re a little different from other manufacturers—we don’t specialize in just infrared optics, or low-cost optics, or […]
Optical design optimization for glass equivalency to reduce supply chain burden
Lens manufacturing is dependent on the supply of optical-grade glasses, and with supply chain issues, glass selection can often make or break project timelines and cost. Experienced lens designers know the importance of glass selection and often need to consider glass availability early in the design process. Restricting the design space to specific glass manufacturers […]
A Review of Optical, Non-Contact Fluid Measurements for Life Science Applications
Optikos has engaged in multiple projects related to non-contact measurement of liquids. Typically, these measurements serve as a quality control (QC) step for an automated fluid handling process. Example projects include: Characterize turbidity (cloudiness) of bacterial samples to evaluate growth rates and populations prior to antibiotic testing Perform a critical, non-contact QC inspection of MRI […]
Coverslip tolerances are an important aspect of your life science imaging system tolerancing budget
High-performance microscope objectives are critical to many life science imaging applications including DNA sequencing, spatial biology, super resolution microscopy, oncology diagnostics, and many other imaging modalities. The microscope objective is usually just one component in a complex imaging system used to achieve high-resolution imaging. Designing these imaging systems often requires a holistic and complex systems […]
Why We Test Lenses Over Temperature: Model Validation, Focus Hysteresis, and Other Unusual Failure Modes
Many applications require high quality imaging over a wide temperature range. This may be due to an uncontrolled environment (e.g. outdoor security cameras), or the intended environment may be regulated to something other than room temperature (e.g. body temperature for endoscopes). However with temperature variation comes thermal expansion, which introduces an opportunity for the flange […]
Parking Lot Parallax
Parallax is something nearly every human, and every animal with a set of forward facing eyes, utilizes every day and they may not realize it. Parallax is the shift in position of objects in a scene when there is a change in the position of the viewer (usually a camera or one of your eyes). […]
Compensation Methods for Glass Tolerances
Precision optical imaging systems span a wide variety of markets and applications including semiconductor, life science, medical device, aerospace, defense, and other industries. Often these imaging systems necessitate demanding performance requirements including diffraction-limited wavefront image quality, pixel or sub-pixel image distortion, as well as broad-band chromatic aberration correction. In order for the optical system to […]
