Beam shifter BSW-20
Optotune’s beam shifters displace light laterally by accurately tilting a glass window. In imaging systems this allows for increasing resolution by a factor of 4. Typical applications include not only camera and projection systems but also non-imaging applications such as optical fiber coupling, 3D printing, and metrology.
Main features:
Fast transition times (1 ms)
Highly reliable and suitable for continuous operation
Standard version supports beam shifts up to 4.8 μm (supports 9.6 μm pixel size in monochrome cameras and 4.8 μm pixel size in color cameras)
Applications
Increase resolution where smaller pixels or larger sensors are not available or too expensive.
Projectors
Super-resolution imaging
Debayering in color cameras
Monochrome cameras
3D printing
Surveillance
Display inspection
Metrology
BSW-20
In the following images, we compare the resolution achieved with the BSW-20 for different examples. In all cases a standard camera with CMOS sensor is used with the BSW-20 placed between a 35 mm lens and the image sensor.
Monochrome camera +40% lateral resolution
Resolution increases from 198 lp/mm (USAF group 4 element 4) to 280 lp/mm (USAF group 5 element 1), which is far beyond the Nyquist limit of 208 lp/mm for this camera (IMX183).
Color camera +100% lateral resolution
Resolution increases from 65 lp/mm (USAF group 3 element 4) to 130 lp/mm (USAF group 4 element 4), which is close to the Nyquist limit of 145 lp/mm for this camera (IMX265) allowing to achieve full resolution on all three color channels.
Display inspection
The example above applied to display inspection shows that with a higher resolution on all color channels it is easier to detect defects on a color display. Can you spot the two missing red pixels?
BSW-20 in operation
Top centre shows the target. Bottom left is the original image, bottom right shows the image with beam shifting toggled on and off.
