The main materials of optical lenses include colorless optical glass, colored optical glass, infrared optical materials, crystal materials, glassy materials, and plastic materials, among a range of optical materials.Optical plastic is a widely used optical material in recent times. It is an organic material that can replace optical glass and has many advantages such as low price, low density, light weight, easy molding, high production efficiency, and high break resistance. Its main disadvantage is that thermal expansion coefficient and temperature coefficient of refractive index are much larger than those of optical glass, and the optical components made from it are greatly affected by temperature, resulting in unstable imaging quality of the focusing lens.

The main difference between optical glass and ordinary glass is that the former has very high transparency, higher physical and chemical properties, uniform color, and specific and very accurate optical constants.