Over the years, the most significant challenges for designing endomicroscopic objectives involved balancing between practical operational parameters. These parameters have included numerical aperture/resolution, field of view, working distance, and outer diameter of an objective. In addition, many applications nowadays use laser as a light source, for which, materials considered in the systems need to be carefully chosen. This dissertation focuses on addressing two specific issues to expand the capabilities of miniature microscopic objectives: (a) maximizing field (critical in clinical applications) while imaging at high resolution and (b) analyzing material properties that are critical in non-linear imaging and developing technologies specific to such materials. Two example system designs were developed to address these challenges. This dissertation describes spectrally encoded detection with a miniature objective to maximize data content and sampling. The objective works in tandem with a coherent imaging bundle, but can be also used with scanning systems. I also present on the development of a crystal based miniature objective for non-linear microsurgery applications. Ultrafast laser microsurgery requires a miniature objective that can non-invasively deliver high power laser pulses with high precision and, to this end, an objective with high NA (0.5 NA) as well as CaF2 and ZnS lenses was developed. CaF2 has a low nonlinear absorption coefficient, which enables the objective to better withstand the high power laser pulses. The high refractive index of ZnS is beneficial for the design of an objective with challenging requirements such as high NA or small outer diameter. As part of the prototyping process for the crystal-based objective, I developed a fabrication protocol for CaF2 and ZnS materials using the single point diamond turning method, which can yield surfaces with optical quality. This aspect has a broader impact since both CaF2 and ZnS materials transmit light from the visible range to long-wave infrared spectral range and can be applied to a number of other imaging applications. As a finishing step, both prototyped systems’ performance was assessed; against an USAF resolution target and ex vivo tissue samples (spectrally encoded system), and by measuring the focal spot size (miniature objective for laser microsurgery). As a result of the assessment, both systems demonstrated results that met the expected performance.