A useful tool to easily check the performance of your system once you have introduced your initial tolerances is the Quick Sensitivity tool. It is similar to the Tolerancing tool; however, in order to give fast results, it uses the Paraxial Focus compensation (where the back focus is the only compensator) and does not run Monte Carlo analyses. The output will show you the sensitivity of all of your tolerancing operands, in addition to listing the “Worst Offenders”, the top tolerances that are giving the largest degradation in performance. You can also see the estimated overall change in performance, as well as how much the back focused was changed while being used as a compensator. Because tolerancing can be such a time-consuming process, using the Quick Sensitivity tool is very helpful for getting a sense of how your system performs before you do a full tolerancing run.

Hey Sarah, one health warning with Quick Sensitivity: for reasons I don't understand it does not consider element tilts or decenters, and only considers surface tolerances. Since element tilts/decs can be an order of magnitude or so bigger than surface tilts/decs, this can lead to wrong results.

It's best to just run the full Tolerancer, with compensation set to Paraxial and zero Monte Carlo files selected. That will do exactly what the Quick Sensitivity is described as doing in the Help file. Of course, if you don't want to include the element tolerances, just don't include them in the Tolerance Data Editor.

Hi Mark,

Thanks for the clarification. That’s an important nuance and is good to know!

In 20.3 that restriction is removed and Quick Sensitivity works great!