This article explains:

• What Partially Coherent Diffraction Image Analysis is
• What different types of partial coherence Gamma functions are available
• The two different computations methods that can be used for partial coherence
• What sampling issues to watch out for when performing partially coherent analysis

This article explains how to determine which glass catalog is being used as the source of the glass data for a specific surface/object. This is especially important when multiple glass catalogs are loaded containing one or more glasses with the same name.

This article explains the benefits of the tolerancing cache feature.  This article also warns when it may be inappropriate to use this feature.

This article explains how to use the Reverse Elements tool to reverse an entire sequential optical system.

This article explains:

• Why default thickness boundary constraints are not always sufficient when optimizing aspheric components

• How the FTGT and FTLT optimization operands can be used to successfully constrain the thickness of a surface at intermediate aperture locations

This article is also available in Japanese.

This article explains:

• What is required to run ZEMAX on an Intel-based Macintosh computer
• The differences between the two methods that can be used to run ZEMAX on an Intel-based Macintosh

This article explains how to exchange your ZEMAX hardlock key for a new Sentinel USB key.

This article explains:

• Why rays sometimes appear to trace behind fold mirror surfaces
• How to fix this problem
• The benefits of the “Add Fold Mirror” tool

This article explains:

• How dichroic beam splitters can be modeled in non-sequential mode
• How to use the flexible table coating format which is useful when the coating prescription data is not available

This article explains why you may see very different results at two co-located surfaces that are at the same location in space, when one of the surfaces is the image surface.