Polishing high-precision lenses for the digital era
Appearance of a lens changes as it is polished
The increasing pixel counts, greater miniaturization, and higher zoom magnification of digital cameras are also creating a requirement for higher-precision lens-processing. Naturally, this increases the degree of difficulty of lens-polishing. "The advent of the digital camera has greatly increased the level of precision required," says Mr. Takashio, who has 40 years' experience working with lenses.
Camera lenses are polished using polishing equipment. Using ordinary polishing equipment, it is extremely difficult to achieve the high-precision polishing required for the lenses used in the latest digital cameras. Mr. Takashio has prescribed improvements and new specifications to the polishing equipment manufacturers and has had them build custom polishing equipment. He has also made the standard tolerance ranges of the jigs and tools used in these operations as stringent as possible.
Both the polishing equipment commissioned by Mr. Takashio and the rigorously standardized jigs and tools have already been introduced at Nikon Imaging (China), where they are actively employed in the manufacture of the COOLPIX compact digital camera series. "These lenses have the highest level of polishing precision of any small-aperture digital-camera lenses in the world," declares Mr. Takashio proudly.