Many of our customers have questions about the terms and methods used by an optical engineer. Our hope is that the information provided on these pages will help you to understand how to interpret some of the results we provide. If you’re interested in optical testing, start here. If you’re interested in optical design, go here. Or, if optics is new to you, it would be a good idea to start with learning basic optical terms. After that, feel free to jump in anywhere.
Lens Design
- Basic Optics Terms
- MTF or Modulation Transfer Function
- Through Focus MTF
- Optical Aberrations
- Tolerances
- The Process of Designing a Lens, or what do lens designers really do?
- How much will it cost?
- Books on Optics
Illumination
- Etendue
- Pupils and Stops
- Critical and Kohler Illumination
- Radiometric and Photometric Terms