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When I worked in a design firm we used CodeV. ZEMAX was for the test and assembly engineers. I think the price difference was 10X!
by gdevenyi 6y ago
When I worked in a design firm we used CodeV. ZEMAX was for the test and assembly engineers. I think the price difference was 10X!
- analog31 6y agoI'm a Zemax user. It's certainly used for serious design work, though it's also acknowledged that CodeV is more elaborate. Granted, I'm not designing high performance optics -- mostly stuff for measurement instruments. For me, since optics isn't even 100% of my job, it's hard to justify upping to CodeV. It would be interesting to work somewhere with test engineers who can grok Zemax. My observation is that unless someone has a degree in optics or physics, they have little hope of understanding optics, and Zemax isn't nearly as user friendly as, say, Solid Works. As I understand it, CodeV is more than just software -- your rental agreement gives you access to their team of optical engineers who also do general optics consulting. They will add features to their program if you need them, which could happen if you're doing something really innovative. I dream of designing optics using Python, but I realize that I might be waiting a while for that.
- joshvm 6y agoIt's a shame that Zemax recently went down the subscription route, but I suppose most users were already getting updates every year anyway. I have a friend who is developing an optical train simulator in Python, but that's for a fairly niche astronomical use case (instruments for the ELT that haven't been built yet). I've always been curious about the optical stuff in Mathematica (there is also Optica) which I think you get for free. Otherwise in places I've worked we used Oslo and Fred (I think one is free if you don't save, so it's useful for quick tests). I know Zemax is used by the telescope folks in my department as well.