Enhancing Image Quality: Design and Aberration Control in a 5X Mechanically Compensated Imaging System

In this work, we introduce a 5X zoom camera system. A mechanically compensated zooming lens system with only two moving lenses was designed, with the capability to vary zoom ratios from 5X to 2X and 1X. All configurations were modeled and simulated with Zemax ray-tracing code. Image quality was optimized using aberration coefficients to improve the resulting image, intensive work was dedicated to minimizing image aberrations. During the optimization process, we prioritized eliminating chromatic and spherical aberrations as much as possible. Many challenges had to be addressed, such as stray light, spherical aberration, field of view, etc. Stray light was controlled by a series of apertures. A comparative study of all system configurations was conducted. We evaluated varied methods to improve image quality and compared aberration coefficients between the original and optimized optical system. Future work will be aimed at improving zoom while maintaining image quality and making the system more compact and portable.