Beam ExpanderThorlabs

Sintec Optronics Pte Ltd, Blk 134 Jurong East Street 13 #04-309D, Singapore 600134. Tel: 0065-862-7224; Fax: 0065-793-8060.

1st Vision has made calculating your lens focal length a bit easier!  As in engineering, its good to know the background formulas, but in practicality, like to simplify life with tools

Galilean beam expandervsbeam expander

The basic formula to calculate the lens focal length is as follows: FL = (Sensor size * WD) / FOVUsing the values from our application,

Galilean beam expanderCalculator

Select Accept to consent or Reject to decline non-essential cookies for this use. You can update your choices at any time in your settings.

You will find our lens calculator HERE.  Alternatively as select a camera, you will find an icon to the right which will automatically populate the calculator.  Below is a short video showing how to use this resource from the camera pages.

Galilean beam expanderpdf

Contact us to discuss your application and help make a recommendation!  1st Vision can provide a complete solution including lenses, cables and lighting.

Beam expanderdesign

In order to select the correct focal length lens which is denoted in millimeters (i.e 25mm focal length), we need additional information on the camera sensor.  Camera sensors come in various "Image formats".  The chart below indicates some common formats which relate to the sensor size.  The sensor size can be found on the actual sensor datasheets if not available in a given chart.

LinkedIn and 3rd parties use essential and non-essential cookies to provide, secure, analyze and improve our Services, and to show you relevant ads (including professional and job ads) on and off LinkedIn. Learn more in our Cookie Policy.

Lenses are only available off the shelf in various focal lengths (i.e 25mm, 35mm, 50mm), so this calculate is theoretical and may need an iteration to adjust working distance. Alternatively, if your application can have a slightly smaller or larger FOV, the closest focal length lens to your calculation may be suitable.

In any industrial imaging application, we have the task of selecting several main components to solve the problem at hand.  The first being an industrial camera and second,  a lens to acquire the given image.  In many cases, our working distance of our lens is constrained and may have to mount the camera closer or further from the object plane.  Once set, this defines our working distance (WD) for the lens.  In addition, we have a given field of view (basically the dimension across the image) of the desired object.

For this exercise, we want to image an object that is 400mm from the front of the lens to the object and desire a field of view of 90mm.  We have selected a camera with the Sony Pregius CMOS IMX174 sensor.  This uses a 1/1.2" format which measures 10.67mm x 8mm.