Reflective Variants of Miniature Microscope Without Lenses

The figure schematically depicts two proposed alternative versions of an instrument that amounts, in effect, to a compact, lightweight optoelectronic microscope that contains no lenses and generates a magnified video image of a specimen. The instrument was described in "Miniature Microscope Without Lenses" (NPO-20218), Vol. 22, No. 8 (August 1998), page 43. In the design and construction of the instrument, the focusing optics of a conventional microscope were replaced by a combination of a microchannel filter and a charge-coupled-device (CCD) image detector. Elimination of focusing optics reduced the size and weight of the instrument and eliminated the need for the time-consuming focusing operation. At the time of the previous article, the instrument was only at the conceptual stage of development, but since that time, a prototype of the instrument has been built and demonstrated to function as intended.