Zemax has been working on this lens (a 270 deg fisheye) for days and the best I can do is about 10 waves PV. In half an hour with SYNOPSYS I’m down to 1 wave. I can only imagine how fast things will go when I really get to know the program!

Don Dilworth is one of the very best optical designers that I have met in my 50 year career. Tasks that may take days to do on competing programs can be done much faster with Don's program. The most powerful feature of all is Don's optimization routine, which can run circles around all of its competitors. This is partly due to his use of pseudo-second derivatives in his optimization program, which results in very fast convergence, no stagnation, and deeper minima than with competing programs.

Let me commend you on an excellent program. Before finding SYNOPSYS, I had a look at KDE (hard-to-learn interface, not windows oriented, …), Zemax (not nearly as easy to use as SYNOPSYS, and more $$$ for the same features), Beam 3/4 (nowhere near enough features) and Optics Lab (again, not enough features)