A custom lens can cost anywhere from a few dollars to tens of thousands. The honest answer to “how much will mine cost?” is that it depends on five things: country of origin, quality standards, design complexity, physical size, and order quantity. As a rough anchor, a single prototype lens element typically runs around $2,000, while high-volume plastic lenses in production can drop to a few dollars each.
Below, we break down exactly what drives that range: why USA-made optics cost more than lenses manufactured overseas, how specs like resolution, waveband, field angle, and aperture push complexity (and price) up, and why ordering in quantity changes the math dramatically. We’ll also cover what to expect for design costs, financing terms, and when a custom lens is worth it versus an off-the-shelf alternative.
If you’re pricing out a specific instrument type, our conoscope lens cost guide covers pricing for conoscopes and, since the two share much of the same measurement approach, gets you most of the way to understanding scatterometer costs too. Our custom lenses for drones page includes a full cost breakdown for drone optics.
Delivering a custom lens involves design and manufacturing, both of which are associated with costs. Stringent quality requirements drive up costs for both, as does the complexity associated with wide fields of view and fast F/numbers. We’ll go into more detail on design and manufacturing below.
Design of any lens starts with the optical design. Choosing the number and shapes of the lens elements and the glass types is extremely difficult. Before the advent of computers, it would take a lens designer years to learn how to design even a simple lens. Thankfully, computer programs for lens design have been perfected over the last 70 years, so a skilled lens designer can design simple lenses in hours. Even for a complex design, a week or two is usually sufficient.
Once the optical design is completed, the next part of the process is the mechanical design. This rarely takes more than a week, but those pesky mechanical engineers always want the optics changed to make their job easier. After an iteration or two, the design of the lens is complete.
The final task is to design the fixturing for manufacturing, assembly, and testing. Our standard billing rates are $250/hour for an optical engineer and $150/hour for a mechanical engineer. They don’t work on a single project 40 hours per week, so the optical design work typically costs $5k to $30k and the mechanical design work costs $3k to $10k.
Keep in mind that the design process for high volume lenses is significantly more involved than the process for a few samples. Spending extra time on the design can save a lot of money in manufacturing when the quantities are large.
Many factors affect the manufacturing cost of a lens, but the main three are country of origin, quality and complexity. Lenses made in the USA cost 5 to 7 times as much as equivalent lenses made in China. High quality lenses will always cost more than lenses with lower quality. And increasing complexity drives up the amount of time it takes to design a lens and the number of components in the lens. Size and quantity are also important. Next, let’s look in detail at these factors.
Lenses made in the USA are far more expensive than equivalent lenses made in China. There are several reasons for this. The first is cost of labor. An engineer’s salary is roughly a third of what an engineer makes in the USA. The difference in manufacturing technician’s salaries is even greater.
The second driving factor is the manufacturing technology. Most lens manufacturers in China use the same production technology that was used to make lenses in the USA a century ago. The equipment is inexpensive, and it works, but it is prone to high variability and requires a lot of labor.
Chinese manufacturers are using automation to reduce the amount of labor, but the underlying manufacturing technology remains unchanged. This method is superb at making large quantities of lenses of modest quality.
In contrast, US manufacturers use CNC grinding and polishing machines that cost over $100k each. A single production cell costs around $500k. The machines are highly precise, so it’s relatively easy to make a lens that meets specifications on the second try.
No one is surprised to hear that high quality lenses cost more than low quality lenses. The only question is how to measure quality. Simply stated, quality is consistency in meeting the required specifications.
Of course, this just passes the buck to the specifications. Lens complexity is driven by specifications, so let’s turn to that.
The more your lens needs to do — resolve finer detail, cover a wider spectrum, capture a broader field of view, the more complex and costly it becomes. These are the primary spec-driven factors:
Requiring high resolution of a lens always drives up the price. Resolution approaching the diffraction limit requires correction of the naturally occurring lens aberrations to small residuals. Correcting aberrations takes additional lens elements and special glass types. Both of these drive up the cost of a lens.
Lenses that must perform well over a wide range of wavelengths cost more than those that only need to perform over a narrow waveband. Lenses commonly perform over a fairly limited range of wavelengths, such as the visible range (450 - 650 nm) or the NIR (750 - 950 nm). While it is possible to correct lenses over a wider range, such as 400 - 1000 nm, doing so requires special glass types and additional lens elements.
Lenses that must capture an image over a wide range of angles are inherently more complex than narrow-angle lenses. Telescope objective lenses are only required to image about 2°, so they consist of two, or at most three, elements. In contrast, fisheye lenses that cover 180° or more can have a dozen or more elements.
Fast lenses require more elements than slow lenses. Fast is defined here as F/2.0 or lower (NA0.2 or higher). For example a 4X NA 0.1 microscope objective is normally an achromatic doublet while a 40X NA0.65 objective takes six or more lens elements. Other types of lenses follow a similar pattern.
Requiring high resolution of a lens always drives up the price. Resolution approaching the diffraction limit requires correction of the naturally occurring lens aberrations to small residuals. Correcting aberrations takes additional lens elements and special glass types. Both of these drive up the cost of a lens.
Lenses that must perform well over a wide range of wavelengths cost more than those that only need to perform over a narrow waveband. Lenses commonly perform over a fairly limited range of wavelengths, such as the visible range (450 - 650 nm) or the NIR (750 - 950 nm). While it is possible to correct lenses over a wider range, such as 400 - 1000 nm, doing so requires special glass types and additional lens elements.
Lenses that must capture an image over a wide range of angles are inherently more complex than narrow-angle lenses. Telescope objective lenses are only required to image about 2°, so they consist of two, or at most three, elements. In contrast, fisheye lenses that cover 180° or more can have a dozen or more elements.
Fast lenses require more elements than slow lenses. Fast is defined here as F/2.0 or lower (NA0.2 or higher). For example a 4X NA 0.1 microscope objective is normally an achromatic doublet while a 40X NA0.65 objective takes six or more lens elements. Other types of lenses follow a similar pattern.
Normal lens elements fall in the range of 10 to 60 mm diameter. Within this range, there is not much variation in price until the volume gets into the hundreds. However, size will affect price outside of this range. Making lenses smaller than 3 mm is quite an art, so tiny lenses command a premium.
Larger lenses require glass that is better annealed. Also, large lenses need special attention in the polishing process to keep the surfaces accurate over their larger areas. Both these factors will increase the price of larger lenses.
As with anything, price is dependent on quantity. You can expect to pay around $2000 each if you’re buying single custom made lens elements. The same lens element in quantities of 100 could cost less than $50.
Normally, price reductions come at quantities of five, ten, twenty, fifty, and so on. Given this information, it’s wise to plan ahead and order a year’s supply. Manufacturers will often quote a price for a certain quantity and agree to ship and bill at intervals. That allows them to choose how to best allocate their manufacturing capacity.
Why is quantity so important? Let me explain.The first part of this is tooling. Almost every surface of every lens has a different radius of curvature, so it requires a different polishing tool and may require a different grinding tool.
Assembly and test fixturing is also normally required. All of this applies whether you order one lens or a hundred, and the cost must be amortized over the quantity. For example, if you order one lens and the tooling costs $1000, the entire $1k must be added to the price of the single lens. However, if you order 100 identical lenses, the tooling will amount to only $10 per lens.
After tooling comes setup. The tooling must be installed on the machines that make the lenses, which takes labor. Once the machines are initially set up, a sample lens is made and tested. These samples are usually not quite right, so the machine must be adjusted, which takes more labor. The amount of labor is roughly the same for one or a hundred lenses, so the same amortization applies.
Next comes lens manufacturing. All lens manufacturers make spares because lenses sometimes get scratched or chipped later in the process, and it’s cheaper to make spares than go through the setup process again. Again, this adds more to the cost of a single lens than larger quantities.
Once the lenses are ground and polished, they are normally coated to reduce the amount of light reflected by the surfaces (anti-reflection coated). Coating chambers are large enough to hold dozens or hundreds of lenses, so the cost of coating a single lens or large quantities is the same. It can easily cost $2000 for a coating run, whether there is one lens in the coating chamber or 100.
Finally, the lens elements are gathered and assembled into the finished lens assembly. This is a process that is different for every lens assembly, so the first assembly always takes longer than subsequent ones. As with all the other steps, honing the process drives down the individual assembly price for larger quantities.
You’ll find enormous price differences between lens manufacturers. Understanding why helps you make better sourcing decisions.
There are four main reasons some companies charge so much for lenses. The most common one is quality. It takes a lot of time and effort to learn how to consistently manufacture lenses that meet their specification. Companies that have high standards charge more.
Location is another reason: companies with all of their operations in the US, Japan or Germany have higher labor costs, so they must charge enough to cover these expenses.
Third, companies that work for the Department of Defense have to fill out an enormous amount of paperwork, so they have to add people to their staffs and charge accordingly.
Finally, there is one company (Optimax) that specializes in quick turnaround lenses. A single lens element can cost $6k if you need it in a week.
Location is again a factor in low prices. It is very difficult to beat “made in China”, partly because of the relatively low labor cost and partly because of the manufacturing expertise they have built up over the last 50 years.
However, even within China there are some lens manufacturers that specialize in high quality and others that specialize in low cost. Extremely low prices can be found at m12lenses.com; today, they list a 3.6mm F/2.0 lens at $4.68. The price is amazing, but we suspect the performance isn’t.
Eckhardt Optics falls in the middle of the price range. All of our lenses are designed and tested in the USA, which increases the cost but guarantees high quality. Our parts and some of our assemblies are manufactured by overseas partners. We have carefully vetted these partners and constantly monitor their quality. We have a long list of companies that have not met our standards; we will never use them again.
It takes a lot of energy to make glass, so the price of lenses varies with the cost of energy. More specifically, glass furnaces typically burn natural gas (methane), so prices have gone up when the price of natural gas rises.
Lens manufacturing is also somewhat labor intensive, so prices rise with labor costs. Leading lens manufacturers are using more and more automation to combat the increasing cost of labor.
Lenses made in the USA cost more for several reasons. The primary driver is that the major customer for these lenses is our government, and they care more about domestic sourcing than price. It is critical to them that we maintain the ability to manufacture lenses locally lest war deprive us of essential components. This has created a culture within the US lens manufacturing industry that lacks international competitiveness. At Eckhardt Optics, we see automation as a golden opportunity to change this culture.
Remember what we said about quantity? That’s the major reason you can buy an off-the-shelf lens for such a low price compared to a custom lens.
Off-the-shelf lenses are made in quantities of hundreds to tens of thousands, so the design cost and tooling are amortized over large numbers. That being said, custom lenses begin to approach the cost of off-the-shelf lenses at quantities of around 50.
Just ask! Our Contact Us page is the place to get started. We will ask you to read some of our educational material (including this page, which you’ve already done).
In the very near future we hope to add cost estimation calculators for a few of our more common lens types to the website. Follow us on LinkedIn to make sure you see the announcements.
Designing a lens is normally the easy part of a project. It often takes many hours to work with a customer to come to agreement on a complete specification. Most customers come to us with a sketch of what they want and a few rough ideas on performance. From this point, we work with them to educate them on what is physically possible. The main points are usually related to etendue and the diffraction limit. We do not charge for this education for qualified customers, so we must cover our costs by charging more for the design work.
Our hourly rate for design work is $250/hour for optical design and $150/hour for mechanical design. In addition to the work required to design the lens itself, we must also design adapters and fixturing so we can test the finished lens. Given all this effort, it is unusual for a design to cost less than $5000, and $30,000 is not unrealistic for more complicated lenses. Really complicated zoom lenses can cost $50k to design.
Eckhardt Optics’ standard terms are 50% down, Net 30. This means that we require half of the total purchase price for your lenses up front. The remainder is due 30 days after you receive the lenses. Shipping costs are normally included in the quoted price, although there are some special cases when it isn’t.
When Eckhardt Optics delivers a formal quotation, that is the final price. There are no hidden costs. There has been only one exception in the history of the company. That was when the President of the USA slapped a 100% tariff on imported lenses. We could not afford to pay the entire tariff; our customer was gracious enough to cover half.
The factors above apply to all custom lenses. For pricing specific to instrument types we commonly design, see:
If you need only a few lenses, and there is an off-the-shelf lens that is close enough to meeting your specification, the off-the-shelf lens is definitely the way to go.
However, if you need at least 50 lenses, the price of a custom lens will be nearly the same as off-the-shelf, so custom is the way to go. Not only will you get a lens that meets your specifications, you will also get our expertise to help you ensure that you get exactly the lens you need.
Interested in seeing some examples of our previous work? Visit our Completed Projects Page to learn more.