Optos Brand Guidelines: The Dunfermline Retinal Imaging Maker Owned by Nikon Since 2015

A Fife start-up with one idea: see more of the retina at once.

Optos began in Dunfermline, Fife, in 1992. The company’s own timeline says it was founded by Douglas Anderson as a spin-out of a project called Plus 180 from Crombie Anderson Associates, and that it was first registered as Zenoplan Ltd, renamed Besca Ltd and then Optos Ltd. Optos says the aim from the start was a patient-friendly device that could capture a digital, ultra-widefield image of the retina, the light-sensitive layer at the back of the eye.

The early years were spent turning that idea into a machine. According to the timeline, a first patent application followed in 1993, and the Plus 180 was shown at the American Academy of Ophthalmology’s meeting in 1995. In 1998 the company’s Panoramic 200 was granted a patent and approved for sale in Europe, and a US headquarters opened the same year. The Panoramic 200 was launched at the American Academy of Optometry and American Academy of Ophthalmology meetings in 1999 and became commercially available in the US, Canada and Germany in 2000.

The image the devices make is called an optomap, and the word itself became part of the brand: the company’s pages state that Optos, optos and optomap are its registered trademarks, and the name is written in lower case. Optos describes an optomap as covering about 82 percent, or 200 degrees, of the retina in a single capture, and says no other device does this in one image. Its main customers are optometrists and ophthalmologists, and the company says its systems are used in practices and hospitals around the world.

Optos grew as a public company. Its timeline records admission to the London Stock Exchange in 2006, and the same year the Royal Academy of Engineering’s MacRobert Award for innovation in engineering. The company also lists Queen’s Awards for Enterprise in international trade in 2001 and 2007.

From Panoramic 200 to Silverstone.

Through the 2000s and 2010s the range widened in steps. The timeline lists the P200MA and P200C in 2008, and the 200Dx and 200Tx in 2010, one aimed at optometry and one at ophthalmology. In 2010 Optos acquired Opto Global, and in 2011 it bought Opko Instrumentation for optical coherence tomography (OCT) technology, the cross-sectional scanning method it later paired with its wide-field images. The same year it introduced Daytona, which began shipping in 2012.

The California device was revealed at the American Academy of Ophthalmology meeting in 2014. In 2019 Optos received a Queen’s Award for Enterprise in the innovation category for California, which the company says was developed and manufactured at its Fife headquarters. Monaco followed in 2018 and Silverstone in 2019; the company says its MonacoPro and Silverstone devices combine ultra-widefield imaging with image-guided OCT.

The ownership changed in 2015. Vision Systems Design reported on 3 March 2015 that Nikon, the Japanese camera and optics company, was acquiring the Dunfermline firm as a step into medical imaging, with ultra-widefield retinal imaging at the core of the business. The magazine quoted Nikon’s president Kazuo Ushida and Optos’s chairman Peter Fellner, who said Optos would become a key part of Nikon’s plan for a global medical business; Roy Davis was then Optos’s chief executive. Optos now describes itself as acquired by Nikon in 2015, and its site links to Nikon’s human-rights policy.

Under Nikon the timeline notes an Optos display installed in the National Museum of Scotland in 2016, a strategic alliance between Nikon and Verily the same year to develop machine-learning tools for eye disease linked to diabetes, and the launch of OptosCloud in the US in 2018. The company marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of its incorporation in 2017, and by 2019, the timeline says, more than 16,000 of its devices were installed. In spring 2022 Optos unveiled Optos AI, which it says carries CE marking in the UK and the European Union.

How eye-care device makers present themselves.

Ophthalmic device makers sell to a narrow, expert audience: ophthalmologists, optometrists, opticians and hospital buyers. Their brochures and websites tend to follow a shared visual grammar. The instrument itself is usually the hero, photographed on a plain white or pale grey ground so that every knob, lens and joystick reads clearly, with the maker’s name small on the housing.

A second register places the same equipment in use. Slit lamps, fundus cameras and refraction units appear in clinic rooms, with a practitioner on one side of the chin rest and a patient on the other; surgical microscopes and laser systems are shown in operating theatres, with a surgeon at the console. Screens matter as much as hardware in this category, so many images show scans, maps or software views alongside the machine.

The third register is explanatory. Cross-section diagrams of the eye, showing the cornea, lens and retina, are used to explain what a device measures or treats, and many makers publish training material and webinars for clinicians. Because these are regulated medical products, some product pages note that a model is available only in certain markets.

Much of the category’s public life happens at congresses. Makers launch and demonstrate equipment on exhibition stands at meetings such as the ESCRS congress in Europe and the annual meeting of the American Academy of Ophthalmology, as well as at optical trade fairs, and their news pages often follow that calendar. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand: who founded it, who owns it now and where it says its products are made.

A lower-case image name that became the brand.

In 2022 Optos marked its thirtieth anniversary with a press release from Dunfermline. It said the company now had four core imaging platforms, Daytona, California, Monaco and Silverstone, more than 22,000 devices installed worldwide and more than 500 employees working in research and development, manufacturing, clinical research and sales. Rob Kennedy, the chief executive, said the company had stayed true to Douglas Anderson’s original purpose. The current site says optomap imaging is available in about 30,000 locations.

The company’s communication leans on its own vocabulary. It marks UWF, its abbreviation for ultra-widefield, as a trademark alongside the lower-case optomap name, and its timeline is told in numbers of devices installed and patients imaged. The awards trail is part of the story too: the company lists Optician Awards for optical supplier of the year in 2018 and 2019 alongside its Queen’s Awards.

For a design guide, Optos shows how a single product idea, a wider picture of the retina, can carry a whole brand, from the device names to a lower-case trademark. Compare Topcon, another maker of eye-imaging instruments with Japanese roots, and Zeiss. For this guide we use a navy, a green and a pale mist with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Optos’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.