With the rapid development of electronic information technology and rapid updates in various applications such as smartphones, automotive, surveillance, AR &VR, lasers, drones, medical and automation systems, the demand for precision optical products is continuously increasing. Chinese manufacturers, which account for nearly 1/3 of the world’s optical capacity, will be your ideal partner to meet sourcing requirements and motivate your business with cost-effective products.
The use of plastic lenses in mobile phone cameras has been increasing in recent years to improve the optical quality of mobile phones. However, problems such as increased camera lens thickness and reduced assembly yield were encountered. Optical lens materials fall into two categories: plastic and glass. Plastic lenses are lightweight, low-cost, and suitable for mass production. Nowadays, plastic lenses are the primary material used in smartphone cameras.
Glass lenses have higher transparency and refractive index, but are more complicated to process and more expensive, so they are mainly used in camera production. Glass-plastic hybrid lenses combine the advantages of both glass and plastic lenses, including good transparency, image quality, high assembly yield, accuracy and light weight. As a result, they are considered as the future direction for upgrading smartphone cameras. Cell phone cameras are constantly being upgraded and innovated as market demand continues to rise for smartphones with smaller sizes, higher pixels and larger apertures. Glass-plastic hybrid lenses have become the first choice for high-end smartphone cameras to meet the evolving demand for thin, versatile and high-precision smartphones. Several brands, including vivo, OPPO, Redmi and Sony, have launched smartphones with glass-plastic hybrid lenses.
According to a research report on the Chinese glass-plastic hybrid lens industry market released by the Newsijie, the relevant suppliers of glass-plastic hybrid lenses include AAC Technologies, lcetron and Sunny Optical Technology. Major manufacturing processes for glass lenses include GMO molding, wafer-level optical element technology (WLO), and wafer-level glass technology (WLG). Among them, AAC Technologies is the only one that has mastered WLG’s technology.
Manufacturing difficulties of glass-plastic hybrid lenses have increased due to the addition of a glass lens, and their industrial scale is currently relatively small, mainly used in high-end smartphones. However, with technological breakthroughs and aggressive placement by major companies, the applications of glass-plastic hybrid lenses will continue to expand into digital cameras, automobiles, wearable devices, smart homes, surveillance and security, and medical instruments, with a wide industrial outlook.
Industry analysts from Nikkei believe that the glass-plastic hybrid lens has the advantages of both glass and plastic lenses and has broad market development prospects in the context of lightweight, multi-functional and high-precision smartphone development. While the difficulty of mass production of glass lenses is significant, the current industry scale of glass-plastic hybrid lenses is relatively small and their applications are limited. Nonetheless, the application area of glass-plastic hybrid lenses is expected to continue to expand as technological breakthroughs and demand upgrades occur.
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