- #1
mikemyers
- 3
- 0
I have an optical design question - hopefully this is the right forum in which to ask. It is "engineer", but it's really optical engineering...
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I am wondering if someone can help me out here with a few questions. I do volunteer work at an eye hospital in India, and we would like to take photos of patient’s eyes, as viewed through a “slit lamp” (the device doctors use when you get an eye exam).
The slit lamp is essentially a microscope. There are optics within the slit lamp, and then there is an eyepiece that you look through to view an enlarged image of the eye. Basically, I assume it is more or less “the same” as a microscope, a pair of binoculars, or a telescope, but with much less power.
We have already developed a method of placing a small digital camera right behind the eyepiece, and we can capture excellent images this way. We have been doing this for years.
In looking around for a better way to capture images, we found a device that is designed to drop into a microscope, replacing the eyepiece, record the image on a digital sensor, and display the image on a computer when connected to a USB port.
Here is a link to one of those devices:
http://www.aunet.com.au/dinoeye_am423.htm
The device works perfectly, but shows a greatly enlarged image of a small part of the eye. This is good for a microscope, but far too powerful for a slit lamp, where we want to see a lot more of the eye, not just a tiny part of it.
We would like to make a device like this, optically designed for our needs. My problem is that while I do know and understand “camera lenses”, I don’t know where to even start on this project.
(Either I need a device that shows more of the subject on the small sensor in the DinoEye, or perhaps the lens is fine, and I just need a larger sensor that covers more area?)
Can someone please help me with the following:
a) What is the difference between an “eyepiece lens” and a normal lens that one might use in front of film or a digital sensor? If there is no difference, can I just put my own lens into the microscope (slit lamp) and put a digital sensor behind it?
b) Are there any good sources in the USA or India where I can purchase a lens for this purpose? I know about Edmund Scientific Company, but I wasn’t able to find anything that might work (possibly because I know so little about what I’m looking for).
c) Are there any good sources for a sensor with USB electronics, that I can mount my own lens to?
If I understood more about how an eyepiece works, I would have a better idea of what I need to find, but I think it is very different from a “camera lens”; a lens for a camera is fully self-contained, and the only thing between the subject and the film/sensor. With a microscope, there already are optics in the system ahead of the eyepiece. Maybe someone here can point me in the right direction to find the information I need? Thanks in advance!
(I have spent some time trying to understand what’s going on. The best resource I have found to date is http://www.birdwatching.com/optics/how_binoculars_work.html and I did take two Nikon camera lenses, as instructed, and sure enough, they did work exactly like a telescope/microscope, enlarging what I was looking at. I used a 200mm “objective” lens and a 50 mm “eyepiece lens”. What I need to do now, is replace the “eyepiece lens” with an appropriate lens and a digital sensor for capturing the image. That is the lens that I need to understand, and to pick one that has a large enough “field of view” to see everything that a doctor might see when looking through the eyepiece of a slit lamp.)
Observations so far:
1 - when using a 50mm lens as the Objective lens, and a 200mm lens as the eyepiece, the apparent size of things in the image are greatly reduced.
2 - when using the 200mm lens as the objective lens, and a 50mm lens as the eyepiece, I end up with something that seems like "2x power binoculars"; everything seems to be twice as large as looking directly at the object.
3 - when using a 200mm lens as the objective lens, and a 20mm lens as the eyepiece, I get something that seems like "6x power binoculars", with a much larger image size. (This is the opposite of what I expected!)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I am wondering if someone can help me out here with a few questions. I do volunteer work at an eye hospital in India, and we would like to take photos of patient’s eyes, as viewed through a “slit lamp” (the device doctors use when you get an eye exam).
The slit lamp is essentially a microscope. There are optics within the slit lamp, and then there is an eyepiece that you look through to view an enlarged image of the eye. Basically, I assume it is more or less “the same” as a microscope, a pair of binoculars, or a telescope, but with much less power.
We have already developed a method of placing a small digital camera right behind the eyepiece, and we can capture excellent images this way. We have been doing this for years.
In looking around for a better way to capture images, we found a device that is designed to drop into a microscope, replacing the eyepiece, record the image on a digital sensor, and display the image on a computer when connected to a USB port.
Here is a link to one of those devices:
http://www.aunet.com.au/dinoeye_am423.htm
The device works perfectly, but shows a greatly enlarged image of a small part of the eye. This is good for a microscope, but far too powerful for a slit lamp, where we want to see a lot more of the eye, not just a tiny part of it.
We would like to make a device like this, optically designed for our needs. My problem is that while I do know and understand “camera lenses”, I don’t know where to even start on this project.
(Either I need a device that shows more of the subject on the small sensor in the DinoEye, or perhaps the lens is fine, and I just need a larger sensor that covers more area?)
Can someone please help me with the following:
a) What is the difference between an “eyepiece lens” and a normal lens that one might use in front of film or a digital sensor? If there is no difference, can I just put my own lens into the microscope (slit lamp) and put a digital sensor behind it?
b) Are there any good sources in the USA or India where I can purchase a lens for this purpose? I know about Edmund Scientific Company, but I wasn’t able to find anything that might work (possibly because I know so little about what I’m looking for).
c) Are there any good sources for a sensor with USB electronics, that I can mount my own lens to?
If I understood more about how an eyepiece works, I would have a better idea of what I need to find, but I think it is very different from a “camera lens”; a lens for a camera is fully self-contained, and the only thing between the subject and the film/sensor. With a microscope, there already are optics in the system ahead of the eyepiece. Maybe someone here can point me in the right direction to find the information I need? Thanks in advance!
(I have spent some time trying to understand what’s going on. The best resource I have found to date is http://www.birdwatching.com/optics/how_binoculars_work.html and I did take two Nikon camera lenses, as instructed, and sure enough, they did work exactly like a telescope/microscope, enlarging what I was looking at. I used a 200mm “objective” lens and a 50 mm “eyepiece lens”. What I need to do now, is replace the “eyepiece lens” with an appropriate lens and a digital sensor for capturing the image. That is the lens that I need to understand, and to pick one that has a large enough “field of view” to see everything that a doctor might see when looking through the eyepiece of a slit lamp.)
Observations so far:
1 - when using a 50mm lens as the Objective lens, and a 200mm lens as the eyepiece, the apparent size of things in the image are greatly reduced.
2 - when using the 200mm lens as the objective lens, and a 50mm lens as the eyepiece, I end up with something that seems like "2x power binoculars"; everything seems to be twice as large as looking directly at the object.
3 - when using a 200mm lens as the objective lens, and a 20mm lens as the eyepiece, I get something that seems like "6x power binoculars", with a much larger image size. (This is the opposite of what I expected!)