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From the floor: Imagine Optic

The number of new products and innovations on the show floor this year is impressive. Today, I stopped by Imagine Optic’s booth (booth 715) and was treated to a demonstration of its new SL-Sys neo system, which uses the company’s wavefront sensor technology.

The interesting thing about this fully-automated system is that it can completely characterize a lens at the push of a button - and it’s ideal for studying the lenses used in digital cameras or mobile phones.

“This is the only commercially available system that can completely characterize optical components 1 to 12 mm in diameter of any numerical aperture,” company director Samuel Bucourt explained. “The new innovation is the way that we illuminate the sample. We can measure the optical element’s aberrations as wavefront errors over the entire field of view and/or at any point therein.”

The control software that runs the SL-Sys neo lets the user decide what parameters they want to investigate. The user simply loads the lens into the instrument and clicks the boxes on the front panel of the software to evaluate quantities such as the 3D and through-focus MTF, chromatism, distortion and vignetting. It takes about 20 seconds to complete the measurement process.

“The SL-Sys neo is ideal for industrial R&D programmes and for production line quality control,” said Bucourt. “It is now commercially available and has a lot of good functionality that has not been easy to realize in one product.”

Posted by Jacqueline Hewett on January 24, 2008 9:24 PM | Permalink