Optiland vs Zemax: an engine cross-check

To validate our custom engine, we trace three designs in both engines: a classic Cooke triplet, a modern smartphone lens, and a wide-angle lens with a circular sensor. We use the same tracing methodology as in the rest of the corpus (sunflower-127, median-centroid, 4x-median radius). In all cases, the ray fans match Zemax to a few hundredths of a micron. RMS spots match in most cases - the differences come from two effects: (1) the same pupil coordinate maps to a slightly different real ray in each engine, which can leave the outlier filter trimming a slightly different set of rays, and (2) Optiland vignettes more rays at the far field of the wide-angle lens, causing larger differences there.

Cooke triplet

Cooke triplet · 50 mm f/5 · HFOV 20.0°. Maximum engine-to-engine deviations: 3.2 % RMS spot, 0.015 µm tangential ray fan, 0.013 µm sagittal ray fan.

Smartphone camera

US-10495850-B2 ex7 · 5.71 mm f/2.32 · HFOV 32.4°. Maximum engine-to-engine deviations: 4.2 % RMS spot, 0.003 µm tangential ray fan, 0.0004 µm sagittal ray fan.

Wide angle camera

Through ~90° every ray survives in both engines and the RMS tracks to ~10 %; past that, Optiland vignettes more of the pupil than Zemax (65 of 127 rays survive at the 106° corner vs all 127 in Zemax), so the corner RMS is computed over different surviving subsets.

US-2018095247-A1 ex3 · 1.6 mm f/2.03 · HFOV 106°. Engine-to-engine deviations: ≤9.5 % RMS spot through 90°, rising to ~60 % at the single 106° corner field where Optiland vignettes most of the pupil (65 of 127 rays survive vs all 127 in Zemax), so the two engines grade different surviving ray subsets; ray fans match to 0.004 µm.

A companion to the Photonium Patent Corpus release.