A novel micro zoom system design with liquid lens

Today zoom optical system is more used in many fields. It can be satisfied with many special imaging instances with its superiority on ability of supplying different visual field and resolution. But the conventional zoom system must have more than two moving elements to realize focus turning and imaging shift compensation at the same time. This makes the system have large volume and weight, and complicated structure. Liquid lens is a kind of novel optical device based on biological vision system. By utilizing this device, zoom camera can be designed in a new simple way. In this paper, a liquid lens operated by a stepper motor had been demonstrated. A new way of designing a micro zoom system without any moving lens had also been introduced. And a kind of hybrid diffractive-refractive liquid lens had been presented to improve the imaging quality. A micro bifocal zoom endoscope system including two pieces of liquid lens was contrived. Finally, it is thought that although many technologies, especially the package method should be solved better, the liquid lens micro zoom system has very wide potential application in the fields that the system's volume and weight are strictly limited, such as endoscope, mobile, PDA and so on.