Compact zoom lens

Claim 1

A zoom lens comprising: from front to rear, a first lens unit of positive refractive power, a second lens unit of negative refractive power and a third lens unit of positive refractive power, the separation between said first lens unit and said second lens unit, and the separation between said second lens unit and said third lens unit being made variable to vary the focal length of the entire system; wherein when the focal length is varied from the shortest to the longest, said first lens unit and said third lens unit move forward, and said third lens unit includes a positive lens having at least one aspherical surface, and wherein said third lens unit includes a plurality of positive lenses and at least one negative lens on the ojbect side of the positive lens having the aspherical surface, the axial deviation x of the aspherical surface from its vertex at a height H from an optical axis is expressed by ##EQU6## where r is the radius of curvature of a reference spherical surface, and A, B, C, D and E are aspherical coefficients, in the domain of third-order aberrations, letting N denote the refractive index of the object space of any lens surface, and N' the refractive index of the image space, Ψ for the aspherical surface and X.sub.ν for the ν-th lens surface are defined as follows: ##EQU7## ##EQU8## where φ.sub.ν is the refractive power of the ν-th lens surface, and α.sub.ν and h.sub.ν are the values for tracing a paraxial ray determined by: ##EQU9## and, letting X N denote the total sum of the values of X.sub.ν for all the surfaces of a negative lens or lenses, and X A the total sum of the values of X.sub.ν for all the lens surfaces in said third lens unit, the following conditions are satisfied: |Ψ|<|X.sub.N | |X.sub.A -X.sub.N -Ψ|<|X.sub.A /3|.