The author attended last week's International Optical Design Conference (IODC) at Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Amongst many papers presented, there were several that were notably important to the ZEMAX user.

Updated April 2010. This article explains how to choose a workstation for running ZEMAX on.

This article is also available in Japanese.

Question: I see that ZEMAX can export in BMP, JPG and metafile format. Which is best?

This article discusses changes in the ZEMAX installer that will affect anyone upgrading from a version older than 12 October 2009

This article is also available in Japanese.

The ZEMAX Black Box surface solves the problem of how to share optical design data without revealing design secrets. This article explains how to export part or all of an optical design as a ZEMAX Black Box surface, and how to use that surface in subsequent optical design, optimization and analysis.

This article is also available in Japanese.

The article explains how to tell if your key is currently eligible for technical support and upgrades to the software.

A problem can sometimes arise when the standalone USB key is use on a machine with LabView and other National Instruments programs installed, as both programs try to use port 6001. This article explains how to fix this problem.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. This article describes some early tests using ZEMAX with the EC2 and gives performance metrics.

Question: What is the normalization radius used by diffractive surfaces for?

Question: ZEMAX supports four birefringent mode flags on the Birefringent_In surface. What are they for, and when do I use them?