Optical design comparison of 60° eyepieces: one with a diffractive surface and one with aspherics

Abstract

An optical design comparison is made between two 60 degrees field-of-view long-eye-relief eyepieces used for viewing a flat image-intensifier P-43 phosphor screen output. One eyepiece contains both spherical glass elements and plastic aspheric elements. The other eyepiece consists of spherical glass elements and a diffractive surface. Both optical designs were optimized by use of identical system constraints for size and weight. The eyepiece containing the diffractive surface provided an improved modulation transfer function performance and has been fabricated and tested. The fabricated lens characteristics and modulation transfer function performance closely matched the design expectations.

Transferring diffractive optics from research to commercial applications: Part I – progress in the patent landscape

“…Finally, due to the extreme different dispersive characteristics of DOEs, compared to refractive lenses, they allow an advantageous combination of both to form hybrid imaging systems with optimized performance and compactness. To name a few, the imaging hybrid concept was applied to eyepieces [1][2][3][4][5], head-mounted displays (HMDs) [6][7][8], inspection systems for semiconductor manufacturing industry [9,10] and also for new concepts of space telescopes [11,12]. In this field, the activities of the Japanese company Canon attracted very high interest.…”

Diffractive/refractive (hybrid) UV-imaging system for minimally invasive metrology: design, performance, and application experiments

“…Ghost images can be critical, especially in metrology applications. Nevertheless, successful systems have been presented for demanding applications like eyepieces [13][14][15] or microscopy [16]. Design strategies like the combination of strong diffractive elements and successful geometrical blocking at least of parts of unwanted orders help to cope with the drawbacks of diffractive lenses and allow for overall high performance.…”

Design of diffractive optical elements for beam shaping of micro-pixellated LED light to a tightly focused spot

“…[4] size geometrical image = size object × z out /z in , (1) where z in and z out are the object distance and image distance, respectively, and size object is the size of the light source. In order to convert spatially incoherent light to a tightly focused spot whose central lobe is smaller than the geometricaloptics limit, diffractive optical elements (DOEs) are the best choice currently available, since they offer more degrees of freedom than conventional dome lenslets, including moulded plastic aspherics [5]. They also offer additional benefits including small dimensions (in particular thickness) and ease of replication.…”