Ball lenses are, as the name suggests, completely spherical lenses most commonly used to couple light in and out of fibers. We can supply ball lens in a range of alternative materials and diameters. We are able to supply high precision grade 3 ball lenses, mid-range grade 25 ball lenses and commercial grade 100 ball lenses offering all grades to suit any application. Aside from fiber coupling applications, ball lenses are also used as objective lenses in endoscopy, laser measurement systems and bar-code scanning. Our half ball lenses offer uniform dispersion of light and typically used in LED displays and LED traffic lights. Ball lenses are used particularly as beam collimators for optical fibers (fiber collimators) and for fiber-to-fiber coupling. They are also suitable for miniature optics with applications like barcode scanning, as objective lenses in endoscopy and for optical sensors. There are also microscope objectives (particularly immersion objectives) which have a hyper hemisphere (e.g., somewhat more than a hemisphere) as the first lens. DG can provide ball lenses and half ball lenses made from various substrate materials including sapphire, ruby, BK7, UV fused silica, high index glass, and germanium, ZnSe, ZnS with AR coating. Our ball lenses and half ball lenses are ideal for applications such as fiber communications, endoscopy and microscopy. Available diameters are between 0.3 mm to 100 mm, with diameter tolerance (sphericity) <0.4 µm and surface roughness (Ra) <0.007 µm. Custom ball and half ball module options are also available on request. Material options include: quartz (260–2500 nm), sapphire (0.17–5.5 μm), ruby (250 nm to NIR), BK7 (or equivalent) (250–2500 nm), UV-grade fused silica (170–2500 nm), as well as B270 (320–2600 nm) and borosilicate (or equivalent) (310–2700 nm) material options.
You can contact us for further information if you are interested in our ball lenses.