Abstract

The use of aspheric plates to correct aberrations is well-known. According to theory, an aspheric plate located at the stop can correct for uniform aberrations across the field of view of an optical system, and when the plate is located away from the stop, field dependent aberrations can also be corrected. The classical example is the Schmidt camera which uses an aspheric refracting plate at the system stop to correct spherical aberration. Another example is the use of aspheric plates near an image plane to control distortion. There are applications in a variety of fields such as microscopy, optical data storage, and zoom lenses where it is desirable to generate variable amounts of aberrations.

© 1998 Optical Society of America