Why don’t photographic mirror lenses have variable apertures?

Asked 3/16/2017

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Mirror lenses are usually fixed-aperture designs. Is there a physical or optical reason a catadioptric mirror lens can’t use an adjustable aperture, or is it mainly a practical design choice? If an aperture were added, would it meaningfully change depth of field, or mostly just reduce the amount of light?

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

9y ago

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There is no real theoretical reason a mirror lens can not have a variable aperture. In fact, many Newtonian reflector telescopes do have a primitive adjustable aperture for use when viewing very bright objects such as the moon.

This homemade one has three holes of different sizes. In normal usage two of the holes would be covered and light would only pass through the selected diameter hole to control the amount of light collected from bright astronomical objects. Such apertures only affect brightness, though. Depth of Field isn't really affected.

homemade variable aperture

The lack of any catadioptric mirror lenses that are made with adjustable apertures are practical reasons.

Most mirror lenses made for photographic usage are catadioptric in their design. That means they combine some of the properties of a reflecting mirror with some of the properties of a refractor lens. Designers do this to create a lens with very long focal length in a form factor much more compact than a conventional refractive lens of the same optical power.

In most cases the front lens element is either a flat dust protector or a "corrector" plate that is either an aspherical refracting lens or a more simple meniscus refracting lens. For lenses with a front corrector plate, the light enters the front of the lens, is refracted by the front corrector plate, is reflected by the primary mirror at the back of the lens onto the secondary mirror located in the center near the front of the lens just behind the corrector plate and then reflected by the secondary mirror through a hole in the middle of the primary mirror at the rear of the lens. Lenses with only a flat front protector plate usually have correcting lens element(s) just behind the primary mirror that refracts the light passing through the hole after it is reflected by the secondary mirror. Lenses with a corrector plate may or may not have additional correcting lens elements behind the primary mirror.

Aspherical Corrector Plate design

Since the secondary mirror (which is sometimes only a silvered surface on the center of the rear side of the meniscus corrector plate in the classic Maksutov–Cassegrain design) requires an obstruction in the center of the lens, a conventional internal diaphragm iris is not possible with such a lens. An external aperture attached to the front of the lens, similar to the one for our Newtonian reflector above, could be used with a flat front plate design. But it would be unwieldy and increase the size of the lens. This defeats the whole purpose of a mirror type lens which is high focal power in a compact design.

Minolta AF 500mm mirror lens

Such an aperture would not affect DoF in any meaningful way, though. Just as with the Newtonian reflector above, the aperture would only affect brightness. DoF is defined by the F-number which is based on the mirror diameter in a catadioptric lens design. The brightness is defined by the T-stop, which is reduced by such an aperture, just as it is reduced by the permanent center obstruction.

There has been at least one mirror lens that did incorporate a manual aperture iris at the very front of the lens. It was available in many popular SLR mounts around in the 1970s and 1980s. In this position the aperture setting only affected the T-stop number of the lens, but not the depth of field. The Ohnar 300/5.6 Mirror (also sold under other names such as Hanimex, Makinon, Panagor, etc.):

Ohnar 300/5.6 Mirror

Originally by user15871. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user15871

9y ago

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AI Answer

Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.

There’s no fundamental law preventing a mirror lens from having an adjustable aperture. Reflecting systems such as some telescopes can use simple aperture masks to reduce the effective opening.

The main reasons photographic mirror lenses are usually fixed-aperture are practical and optical:

  • In many catadioptric designs, the primary mirror effectively acts as the aperture stop.
  • The optics are mechanically crowded, so adding a large diaphragm mechanism is difficult and expensive.
  • Moving the stop elsewhere in the design can worsen aberrations such as coma, astigmatism, or distortion.
  • Making room for a larger central opening or extra mechanism can force the lens to become bigger and less practical.

Also, stopping down a mirror lens mostly reduces light; it is not usually a very useful way to improve image rendering. And for your depth-of-field point: it’s the opposite of what you wrote—smaller apertures (higher f-numbers) increase depth of field, while larger apertures decrease it.

So: variable aperture in a mirror lens is possible in principle, but uncommon because it adds complexity, size, cost, and often optical compromises without much benefit.

UniqueBot

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9y ago

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