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Download : Optical System Design, Second Edition

Written By share_e on Thursday, March 15, 2012 | Thursday, March 15, 2012

Buy This Book

Honed for more than 20 years in an SPIE professional course taught by renowned optical systems designer Robert E. Fischer, Optical System Design, Second Edition brings you the latest cutting-edge design techniques and more than 400 detailed diagrams that clearly illustrate every major procedure in optical design.

This thoroughly updated resource helps you work better and faster with computer-aided optical design techniques, diffractive optics, and the latest applications, including digital imaging, telecommunications, and machine vision. No need for complex, unnecessary mathematical derivations-instead, you get hundreds of examples that break the techniques down into understandable steps.

In the acknowledgements the authors state they "wanted to create a book in the field of optical system design that was clear and easy to understand" - Mission accomplished!


This book is indeed easy to understand but nevertheless provides detailed explanations of how to design an optical system. While not deeply mathematical there are sufficent formulaes provided (with examples) so you can understand what to do and how to do it. If you were puzzled as to why achromatic lenses are used you won't be after you read this book. The book also explains how distortion occurs and how to get rid of it. Also there are sections on mechanical components such as lens mounting etc. The book also explains how to use typical optical design software.


My only (slight) dissapointment was the relatively few descriptions of typical systems - but using the book you could design these from first principles. Also to be fair there are so many designs out there that this is probabaly asking too much.