December 19, 2012

Sensor+Lens Tool

by Oleg Dzhimiev

There’s a number of online lens calculators already and this one is not conceptually different – the focus is on the current sensor we use and the main feature is visualization done in HTML canvas using jCanvas.

It might help to figure out what lens is needed for a particular application where certain parameters can be important, e.g.:

  • Field of view for a lens of the given format
  • Depth of field at a fixed distance and f-stop
  • Aperture size (f-stop) at which the resolution starts to degrade due to diffraction limiting
The tool covers:

  • Different sensor formats (also compared to the “full frame” format)
  • Circle of confusion formulae (affects hyperfocal distance and depth of field):
    • 1px – for machine vision applications
    • d/1730 & d/1000 – “Zeiss formula” for photography
  • Distance to in-focus plane
  • Lens focal length
  • Field of view
  • Diffraction limit for aperture size (calculated for red light of 690nm, Airy disk size equals to 1px)
  • Depth of field


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