Ball lenses are usually made with relatively small diameters of a few millimeters or sometimes even less than 1 mm (microlenses). Particularly for such small dimensions, they are easier to fabricate than lenses with traditional designs.

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.

Ball lenses are commonly used to improve signal quality in fiber coupling applications, or for use in endoscopy or bar code scanning applications. Our ball lenses feature short back focal lengths to minimize the distance needed from the ball lens to the optical fiber.