We’re at part 2 of our Ventus HD Tech talk, and we’re here to talk about the lenses that we use in our Ventus HD6 family of infrared cameras.
The Smallest Ventus HD6
We have our family of Ventus HD products displayed in the above image. These camera are the HexaBlu® sensors combined with a few lenses that we have developed for this product. Starting with a small one, we had a customer that just had a single field of view requirement, 30 millimeters lens, a simple, very high performance lens with one field of view and variable focus and locking focus mechanism combined with the video processing. The fixed field of view offers a 15° horizontal field of view(HOV), and we have a couple other fixed field of view lenses that have focal lengths of 150 millimeter and 200 millimeters. If there’s a custom requirement, fixed field of view lenses are relatively easy in their development.
The Folded Optic, Low-SWaP HD6
The other strategy that we’ve pursued to develop is continuous zoom lenses, most of our customers lie is with continuous field of view applications. The lens on the Ventus HD6-2.4 is a continuous field of view going from 2.4° HOV to 24° HOV. This design has a 180 degree fold. It is perfectly matched to the sensor and you can see that it is capable of fitting into small spaces. This is designed for primarily airborne applications but also suitable for a number of ground applications.
The Longest Range HD6
On the other side, you have what we call our Ventus HD6-0.6. This camera has an extremely narrow field of view. It gets down to 0.6° HFOV. The 0.6° translates into 8.3 micro radian IFOV, or the field of view of a single pixel. This is designed to see humans out to 20km, vehicles out to 32km. This camera is the longest range, mid-wave infrared camera that is available on the market today, when you take into account the focal length of the lens and the pixel size of the sensor. This is because the Ventus HD6 is based upon 6 micron HD pixels from the HexaBlu® cooler assembly.
Sierra-Olympia is currently developing another lens that will be a continuous FOV lens, whose narrow field of view is 1°. In total we will have a family of 2.4°, 1.0° and 0.6° narrow field of view lenses, all continuous zoom, all idealized for the HexBlu® sensor.
This concludes the second part of our two part series on our product related to the HexaBlu® cooler and sensor system. If you need to learn more, please visit the Ventus HD6 product pages for more blog and videos.