A library of lens designs is helpful for the optical engineer.  Tasks that can benefit from such a library include choosing a starting point for a new design, finding benchmarks for an existing design, and assessing design targets.  Many optical engineers have spent significant time building their own individual libraries; these individual libraries are instructive to the designer but are necessarily limited in scope and unlimited in time demands.  Other libraries are for sale.  These commercial libraries can be quite comprehensive, but the designer misses out on the lessons learned from building the library himself.

This site is intended to build a better design library, by building on collaborative efforts of its users.  A large library can be built by making the site collaborative; users can learn from others' efforts via discussions and release notes.  Please participate in this collaboration.

All designs are in the public domain, either in patents or publications.  All design files submitted to the site must also be in the public domain.

This site is owned and operated by Daniel J. Reiley, Ph.D.  You can contact me on my gmail account: dan dot reiley, my LinkedIn account, or in the Comments section.

     Check them out on the Primes page., 

              Most of the comments have been from people having difficulty using files downloaded from this site.  I believe most of the problems are with browser settings and .zmx file structure.  Visit the page on loading files for details.        

January 26, 2017 -  40 models for smartphone lenses posted 
              I think the correct term is “mobile imaging,” but it will always be a phone to me, even if it has a great camera.  I posted the files on the Primes page.

January 24, 2017 -  13 new files posted 
              I made initial postings to the endoscopes page and the telescopes page.   The endoscopes are random, the telescopes are mostly unobscured reflectors.  I also added six files to the eyepieces page.

October 12, 2016 -  46 telephoto lenses posted
              Today I posted 46 lens files for telephoto lenses.  You can find the design files and a little explanation the page for Prime lenses.

September 14, 2016 -  19 fisheye lenses posted
              Today I posted 19 lens files for fisheye lenses.  You can find the design files and a little explanation the page for Prime lenses.

              Today I posted 56 zoom lens files.  All are for folded zooms, which provide an interesting study.  As I described in a paper at the 2014International Optical Design Conference, this class of optics is interesting be they are of a reasonable complexity that the designs are likely to be instructive, they offer a small range of design constraints because of the standardization of CMOS imager sizes and the mechanical constraints imposed on DSC cameras, and there is enough recent activity in awarded patents that a representative sample of contemporary designs can be collected.  You can find the design files and some analysis on the page for zoom lenses.

    These lenses all have a 42mm image circle, fitting the full-frame images found on high end photography cameras.  Focal lengths range from 15 to 925mm.  I find them interesting because they tend to achieve excellent image quality without heavy use of aspheres, making them good benchmarks for other custom optical systems.  Analysis on the primes page also shows the distribution of glass types and paraxial properties for these lenses.

January 21, 2015 - 25 design files for microscope objectives added
              These files represent a wide variety of objectives, typical 40X objectives, high-magnification immersion objectives, low magnification objectives for inspection microscopes, and some unusual catadioptric objectives, too.  YOu can find them, as well as a little summary, on the page for Microscope Objectives.

November 19, 2014 - Major update: more than 500 new files added
              There’s a major update today - the addition of over 500 files based on the design examples from Cox’s “A System of Optical Design.”  300 files are in Oslo format, submitted by Michael Gauvin from Lambda Research Corporation.  227 are files that I built independently in Zemax format.  Most of the files are photographic primes, so I put a little summary there.  65 files are eyepieces, so I placed them on that page.

September 5, 2014 - 25 Double Gauss designs posted
              For the first posting to this site, I’ve chosen double-gauss designs, posted to the Photographic Primes page.  These Zemax models are all based on patent literature; they include the original patent, from 1897, modern patents, from 2013, and a nice sampling from in-between.