Miniaturization of zoom lenses with a single moving element

We present an analysis of single-moving-element zoom lenses in the thin-lens limit and show how the length of these zoom lenses is determined by the zoom-factor, sensor-dimension and the depth-of-focus. By decreasing the sensor size and extending the depth-of-focus, the lengths of these zoom lenses can be reduced significantly. As an example we present a ray-traced design of a miniaturized single-moving-element zoom lens with a 2.3x zoom-factor and show how the exploitation of modern miniaturized detector array combined with wavefront coding enables a reduction in length of almost three orders-of-magnitude to 10mm. © 2009 Optical Society of America.