Wide angle lenses – advantages, disadvantages and applications

Wide-angle lenses are in demand in factory automation applications where vision cameras need to pull in data from a wide field of view. They are also used in medical imaging and life science research but notably they are in demand because of the trend of using 360° images to show the surroundings in high resolution. This could be used on you family vehicle or more often on military vehicles where it might be an advantage not to have window.

For all these applications – customer demand is for wide angle lenses with as near to zero distortion as possible allowing images to easily be stitch together.

Traditionally wide angles lead to distortion, depending on how you calculate the distortion you will typically be looking at between 5 to 15%. The lens will also require a very large front clear aperture. Both the distortion and the large diameter would render the design unsuitable for 360° applications.

There is a solution, but it comes with its own drawbacks. It is possible to use moulded aspherical wide angle lens elements to achieve <1% distortion. A new design we are investigating would be like a lens in a smart phone. By using moulded glass and plastic aspheric elements the overall size of the design can be kept small. The main downside of this approach is that custom moulded aspherical elements are only economically viable if you are producing larger numbers of lenses. This is due to the cost of the moulds. A technical limitation for some applications is the very short back register distance and the steep ray angles required to achieve the low distortion which can create issues with the angle of light rays’ incident on the sensor.

Resolve Optics is currently investigating how lower volume wide angle lens applications can benefit from moulded aspheric elements.