Fancy new optics

[Atg336]

This was on the Popular Science webpage:

scope

I've never heard of polymer optics, especially for focusing in a scope, but it looks promising. Any thoughts from SMEs on rifle optics? Is this viable or another fancy dead end?

[SOW_0331]

I would try one. Hell, I would buy one confidently. It may not be as "crisp" as some scope perfectionists would like, but it has the potential to offer a fast, lightweight, and mult-optic clip on that would increase capability in ways never thought possible. While I don't see it being used primarily in a RS/TA environment, it has clear use in a DMR role that make it worth investing in.

And if these polymer optics begin to filter into the optic market, maybe some of the folks making dumbass decisions lately (ACO comes to mind) will be forced to start making better products at lower costs. If I can get the RAZAR for say...$1200...and that's a HIGH estimate from what I'm reading, then why would I get a fixed power trijicon for the same price and higher weight? What would I spend $3k on a Leupy CQBSS for, when I could plop the RAZAR in front of an EOTECH or behind it. I'm excited for this sort of forward thinking innovation. And I don't need someone to tell me I have to "get it" to understand the manufacturing and performance benefits...oops.

[Campbell]

Very cool...bring it to the masses!

[teutonicpolymer]

I have some background in optics so I feel like I might be able to add something here.
Polymer/plastic lenses (like PMMA is a classic material) tend to be of lower optical quality than glass but they have some advantages like you can make aspheric surfaces with injection molding to create inexpensive aspheric lenses (after an expensive molding set up is invested in). With glass it tends to cost more to do fancy things like aspheric surfaces because you are generally confined to grinding and polishing processes.
From what I remember with materials, glass is actually pretty strong but does not give in the plasticity sense and tends to break from microfractures already in the glass being propagated under stress so you could not really do this type of setup with glass. Plastic on the other hand can be bent more and returned to its original shape with out breaking the lens.

The main problem I could see with this is thermal effects. Plastics are generally kind of bad with thermal expansion. It is possible to do some clever opto-mechanical stuff to mostly cancel out issues you would get due to temp changes but it might be a little more difficult in this case (not sure if you could do it in any simple way) since you have this bending lens which is changing focal length.