Investigations into the Assembly of Multi-CCD Prism Beamsplitters for TV-Cameras

3-CCD color cameras which incorporate an imager consisting of a dichroic beamsplitter prism and 3 attached black-and-white CCD chips provide the best resolution and light sensitivity as well as true colors, but require sophisticated alignment and assembly procedures. A prism beamsplitter has been designed and developed for a commercial TV camera objective, which corrects the optical aberrations introduced by the prism. An assembling device for fabricating 3-CCD dichroic beamsplitters on a laboratory production scale has been developed and tested. The device allows CCD chips to be aligned and joined with position uncertainties of about ±0.5 mu m along the image plane and ± 5 mu m along the optical axis and with an uncertainty of rotation around the optical axis in the order of ±0,5'.