Electrically-tunable optical zoom system by using liquid crystal lenses

Abstract

An electrically-tunable optical zoom system using liquid crystal (LC) lenses is demonstrated. The mechanism of the optical zoom system is to use two lenses and a camera system to achieve focusing and zooming function. In this paper, we analyzed the imaging conditions and the magnification of the optical zoom system. The relation between the focusing properties of LC lenses and zoom ratio of the optical zoom system is also discussed. The electrically-tunable optical zoom system using two LC lenses has high zoom ratio (similar to 7.9: 1 to similar to 5.5:1), short system length (<10 cm) and the object can be zoomed in or zoomed out continuously at the objective distance of infinity to 10 cm. The potential applications are cell phones, cameras, telescopes and pico projectors.