A Pencil of Rays

put things in focus

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Comparison of the Double Gauss and Sonnar lens designs.

Do you think that lens design is all math, with complex equations and multiple calculations? That’s only partly true. There is another aspect of lens design that requires intuition, experience, and an “eye” for good performance. A more qualitative approach to the lens design that is a bit lost. I want to compare two lens […]

The evolution of the landscape lens – from Wollaston to the Protar

The landscape lens is a fascinating look through the history of lens design. We go from a very primitive single lens design that made careful considerations of astigmatism to achieve maximum performance, with incremental improvements, finally to a lens that made strategic use of a new cemented lens configuration that was groundbreaking for its time. […]

Inside the thin lens design and colour correction of the achromatic doublet

Introduction to the importance of colour correction with an achromatic doublet Colour fills the world. When we image those colours with lenses, we want it to represent what we see. Even in the days of black-and-white photos, the scene is is colour, right? Without colour correction, we can get blurry photographs since each of the […]

I presented at the ODG63 lens design conference.

A little while back, I gave a talk at an optical lens design conference in Tokyo. I had a blast, and I’d like to share my experience here. -Background: (The Optical Society of Japan) There is an organization in Japan called the Optical Design Group (ODG), a government institute that promotes optical lens design. ODG […]