Everything you need to design optical systems
OpticStudio® is the standard for optical, illumination, and laser system design in universities around the world, and in leading companies throughout the optics industry.
Academic Standard
Trusted
Global Use
eGuide: Designing for Manufacturability
Bring optical systems to market more quickly and
cost-effectively with a streamlined engineering workflow.
Whitepaper: Gain critical accuracy and speed in STOP analysis with the OpticStudio STAR Module
Customer Example: Exploring UV spectrums and searching for life on other planets.
Learn More
Özyeğin University uses OpticStudio for channel modeling in optical wireless communication
Learn about the 3-step channel modeling process Özyeğin University uses in Zemax.
Learn MoreWhat can OpticStudio do for you?
Set up your system
OpticStudio’s intuitive user interface includes easy-to-learn tools and wizards which enable efficient simulation and design of any optical system.
With more than 200 field points you can set up even the most complex freeform and non-rotationally symmetric systems.
Design high-confidence virtual prototypes with the only optical design software that can model everything from imaging optics to illumination, including stray light analysis.
Analyze your system to evaluate performance
OpticStudio includes a suite of optical engineering tools to analyze the performance of your system. In addition to the classic analysis functions, OpticStudio also offers Full-field Aberration analysis to improve freeform designs; contrast analysis for MTF optimization; and Image Simulation to produce photorealistic images of object scenes.
Optimize your system to meet manufacturing specifications
State-of-the-art optimization tools automatically improve the performance of optical designs based on user-defined constraints and design goals. This saves time by eliminating design iterations.
Optimize for MTF up to 10x faster with Contrast Optimization - which removes multiple design and test steps inherent in older processes.
Final tolerance analysis to ensure manufacturability
For years, the Monte Carlo tolerance analysis in OpticStudio has been the gold standard for simulating how designs perform in the real world.
More optical research papers rely on OpticStudio to accurately simulate their designs than any other optical software.
With OpticStudio, optical engineers are confident that their systems will meet the real-world performance demands of their customers.
Customize OpticStudio to suit your needs
With the ZOS-API, you can create standalone applications, build your own analyses, and control OpticStudio externally using C#, C++, MATLAB and Python.
Zemax Programming Language (ZPL) enables you to write your own macros to automate repetitive processes.
Custom DLLs allow creation of any surfaces, objects, sources, and scatter functions.
Set up your system
OpticStudio’s intuitive user interface includes easy-to-learn tools and wizards which enable efficient simulation and design of any optical system.
With more than 200 field points you can set up even the most complex freeform and non-rotationally symmetric systems.
Design high-confidence virtual prototypes with the only optical design software that can model everything from imaging optics to illumination, including stray light analysis.
Customer Success Stories
Imaging Optics
Advanced tolerancing techniques for endoscope optical design
Lasers & Fibers
nLIGHT uses OpticStudio to create a robust, multi-kilowatt laser that enriches how devices display images
Imaging Optics
Flexibility built into OpticStudio helps LightPath design for manufacturability across a range of solutions
Lighting & Illumination
Redefining human-machine interactions through eye tracking
Frequently Asked Questions
Standard – best for designing and optimizing simple lenses (sequential systems only). It is the industry standard for basic sequential ray tracing and analysis.
Professional – best for designing optical systems like camera lenses and telescopes (non-sequential capabilities). Alongside Premium, it’s the only solution with both imaging & illumination ray tracing.
Premium – best for complete optical product design like smartphones and satellites (enables CAD integration). It’s really the best solution for accurately simulating the real-world behavior of optical products.