Customer Reviews

Practical Optical System Layout: And Use of Stock Lenses

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This book is a good introduction to the art of optical design. It is an excellent first read for any student who wants to learn practical optics, avoiding heavy math and focusing mainly on real-life examples following simple reasoning backed up with essential formulas and calculations, which illustrate how to derive a preliminary design, before starting any optimisation with some optical software. Nowadays anyone could do optical design using powerful package like OSLO, Zemax or Code V, it is so easy to ask the program to find a solution for you, but without understanding the basic principles, it is just an illusion that one can really design an optical system.

If one really wants to invest time into optical design, at least they should cover fundamentals, and this book gives this foundation in a concise and comprehensive form (200 pages book is not a formidable brick). In terms of practical use, it is similar to Donald C. O'Shea's book "Elements of Modern Optical Design", which also contains a lot of sample calculations, yet examples given in both books are very different. "Elements of Modern Optical Design" covers more about exact ray traces and third order aberrations (which can be done with the use of an optical software), whereas "Practical Optical System Layout" covers mainly paraxial calculations and focuses on optical elements and their combinations to reduce particular type of aberrations. A deeper treatment of aberration theory can be found in "Modern Optical Engineering" book by the same author, and in particular for lens design in his outstanding, but more advanced book "Modern Lens Design". Of course one may read introductions in Mellesgriot catalogue about different optical elements and their usage, but to get a systematic coverage of various concepts for optical design, this book is a good start.

This book is not complete enough for what it claims to be. A full time lens designer might find it useful as another opinion though.

The book title is quite interesting: PRACTICAL OPTICAL SYSTEM LAYOUT AND USE OF STOCK LENSES? Did we get what that announces? Unfortunately NO.

It seem than that book is not enough different or even not a complement to be read before, at the same time or after the first Warren J. Smith book ¡°Modern Optical Engineering¡±.

I was quite interested by the last chapter: Getting the Most: Out of ¡®Stock¡¯ Lenses. But I did not find a little number of graph advice or what ever extra stuff than present in the first Smith¡¯s book.

Without comparing page per page PRACTICAL OPTICAL SYSTEM LAYOUT is a sort of ¡°Modern Optical Engineering¡± without substance. I sincerely don¡¯t see what sorts of professional who have advantage to read that. Maybe some college Biology teacher? But I don¡¯t think so.

PRACTICAL OPTICAL SYSTEM LAYOUT seem to be half the way between a equation book like Schaum¡¯s and what ever you find at the beginning of any optic manufacturer catalogue (like Linos, Mellesgriot and Edmund who you get free by post or by the net).

Let¡¯s proof what I said with some example. First of all: if find a mistake at page 168 for the shape factor (k=c1/c1-c1) obviously without sense (but that proof nothing). Second like during all my science education in Smith¡¯s throw away lot of difficult concept without giving you some order what is the most important, what that concept mean! What is MTF, what is Coma, why we can¡¯t use first order optic to design what ever you want. Such simple question need a lot of word, lot of phrase, a lot of paragraph, a lot of example, a lot of graph and a lot of pages.

In conclusion, this ouvrage is for me a big deception. And author fail to teach you the ¡°first cut¡± of optical design.