What do lens elements, groups, and aperture blades mean, and how do they affect image quality?
Asked 4/13/2012
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I’m trying to better understand lens design. For example, the Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6 is listed as having 14 elements in 10 groups. What do “elements” and “groups” mean? Are they the same as the aperture blades? How does having more elements or different kinds of elements affect the optics and final image?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
14y ago
2 Answers
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The "elements" and the "blades" are two completely different things.
An "element" is a single piece of glass in the lens. Most of what's shown on the diagram are the lens elements. Some elements are colored pink, to indicate that their shape is aspherical. Other elements are colored blue, to indicate that they are made of a special type of glass. Others are uncolored, because they're just ordinary "spherical" elements made of typical kinds of optical glass. Your eyeglasses have a single element for each eye. Generally, using more elements, and using exotic types of glass or aspherical elements, allows the designer to better correct aberrations, or optical faults, in a lens.
When two or more elements have their surfaces in contact with each other (instead of having a gap between them), they form a group.
The number of blades refers to the number of diaphragm blades, that form the aperture stop. The diaphragm is an iris that you can make bigger or smaller, to control the amount of light that can pass through the lens. The location of the diaphragm is noted in the drawing by the vertical lines near the middle of the lens, above and below the central axis.
The number of blades is not shown in the diagram. The diaphragm looks like this:

This diaphragm has 6 blades; you can see that the aperture (opening) is a hexagon (6 sides). The number of blades is one of the factors that affects the bokeh of the lens. Your eyeglasses do not have any blades, because there's no adjustable diaphragm in eyeglasses.
Originally by user2138. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user2138
14y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
Lens elements and aperture blades are different parts of a lens.
- Elements are individual pieces of optical glass.
- Groups are sets of one or more elements that are touching or closely combined and function together.
- Aperture blades are the thin metal leaves that open and close to control the size of the aperture.
So “14 elements in 10 groups” means the lens contains 14 glass pieces arranged into 10 optical sections. Some may be cemented or paired together in a single group.
Why so many elements? Modern lenses use multiple elements to correct optical aberrations such as distortion, chromatic aberration, softness, and field curvature. Special element types help further:
- Aspherical elements help reduce distortion and improve sharpness.
- Special low-dispersion glass helps control color fringing.
A simple pair of glasses usually has one element per eye because it only needs to correct a narrow set of vision issues. A camera zoom lens must perform well across many focal lengths, focus distances, and across the whole image frame, so it is much more complex.
Aperture blade count mainly affects the shape of out-of-focus highlights and the appearance of sunstars, not the basic optical correction provided by the elements.
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