The Optics Of Rainbows
By Gustav Strömqvist | Rainbows are a beautiful physical phenomenon, forming as the result of how the sunlight refracts and reflects inside droplets of water before reaching your eyes. In the visible range, water has a refractive index of n ≈ 1.33 or n ≈ 4/3, with a difference of around 0.0013, or 1%, between violet (400
Etendue and Optical Invariants
By Olov von Hofsten and Simon Olin | “The possibilities of optics are endless” – you may have heard things like this and it sounds great and wonderful. Unfortunately it is not true – you have been told a lie. The possibilities of optics are NOT endless. In fact, it is very important to know […]
The Perfect LiDAR – does it exist?
By Olov von Hofsten | As a consultant, I have often been approached by unrealistic requirements from customers, and the LiDAR business is particularly prone to this. Perhaps because the technology is new. A customer often wants: If a customer was to write a specification for a camera system, this would not happen, as there […]
Understanding Camera Sharpness: The relationship between pixel count and resolution in smartphone cameras
By Jan Lüttgens | In a previous post, we explained how sharpness and resolution are two separate characteristics of a camera system. Yet, from a consumer perspective they may seem to be somewhat correlated, as lens and image sensor resolution are matched and combined with a finely tuned image processing pipeline to yield optimal perf
Simulating Luminance in Zemax
By Olov von Hofsten | Luminance is arguably the most important component to analyze when evaluating a lighting design since it answer the fundamental question, “What will it look like?”. In Zemax you get easily get the luminance for an entire surface, but not the local luminance or luminace maps. However, there are ways around [&h