This blog can serve as a “front end” to the rest of my web site. I can write a short introductory paragraph that introduces another web page on my site.

I just remembered a paper that is currently not linked and I mention it here. I am always reworking my site, and this link got left out. It will get put back in eventually.

A few years ago I did some studies of the diffraction limit of lenses. This paper is here. A catchy name for this paper would be something like New Year’s Resolution. This is a matter of plugging some numbers into some formulas (well maybe a bit more), but the results are somewhat interesting. This analysis is approximate and a more exact analysis would use MTF analysis, which is not done here.

I am a big fan of resolution and I still don’t have enough and can’t get enough of it. This analysis does say that eventually we will come up upon the limit. But there are so many other fancy features in the new cameras that resolution is only part of the issue. As a general rule, the larger the detector size the higher the theoretical resolution, and this depends on the f# number, as discussed.