What Is an Industrial Lens?
Industrial Lenses are lenses used in cameras for business applications, such as monitoring and inspection of production lines in factories and security cameras.
The structure of industrial lenses is the same as that of lenses used in consumer products such as single-lens reflex cameras. However, they are designed to meet specific performance requirements, such as higher resolution and lower distortion, depending on the intended use. Industrial lenses, like consumer camera lenses, have a structure called a lens mount that connects the lens and the camera with the imaging element.
There are various types of lens mounts, and they can be interchangeable through adapters. However, it is important to note that some lens mounts are not compatible with each other.
Uses of Industrial Lenses
Industrial lenses are used in combination with industrial cameras. Industrial cameras are widely used in the production lines of various industrial products. Specifically, they are used in the fields of semiconductors and ICs, medical and pharmaceuticals, agriculture and food, automobiles, metal processing, and production plants for resins, ceramics, and film products.
Around us, the lenses used in surveillance and security cameras are also industrial. Automobiles are also equipped with cameras to assist driving and automatic driving, and the lenses used in these cameras can also be called industrial lenses.
Principle of Industrial Lenses
Industrial lenses are the same as the lenses used in consumer cameras, which are composed of several convex and concave lenses. Industrial lenses are often required to have particularly low distortion and are designed to prevent image distortion even at the periphery of the image. Some lenses use a design called telecentric optics.
Telecentric optics refers to a lens configuration in which the size of the object does not change even if the focus is changed. For example, if the front surface is a convex lens, the optical path changes so that light irradiated on the lens converges toward the rear surface of the lens. A lens that corrects the optical path by placing multiple lenses on the optical path to make the light parallel from the rear surface of the lens toward other components is called a telecentric lens.
In lenses for consumer-use single-lens cameras, a mechanism called an aperture and focusing ring is generally installed. However, some industrial lenses have a fixed aperture and focus. This is because the operating environment is fixed and the lens is optimally designed for the conditions in which it will be used. The mechanism of the aperture is based on the same principle as that of the human pupil, adjusting the amount of light coming through the lens by changing the size of the optical path diameter.
These functions also allow the photographer to adjust the range of focus, called depth of field. The focusing ring is a function that allows the lens group to move so that the subject is formed on the imaging element through the lens.
Types of Industrial Lenses
Industrial lenses, like consumer lenses, include wide-angle, standard, and telephoto lenses, single-focal length lenses, and zoom lenses. Other industrial lenses include line sensor lenses, which are specialized for very long and narrow areas, and telecentric lenses.
There is also a category of lenses for micro-photography, diagonal, and circumferential fisheye lenses. Micro-photography lenses are used for inspections to check minute damage on small objects, as they can reflect objects at extremely close distances.
Diagonal and circumferential fisheye lenses can show an even wider area than wide-angle lenses. Despite the disadvantage of significant distortion in the acquired image, they are used when it is necessary to capture an extremely large area, such as with an in-vehicle camera.
