Scophony light valve

Abstract

The optical modulator in a flying spot scanner converts the electronic video signal into a corresponding temporal modulation of a light beam. An alternative configuration, which directly exploits the spatial modulation of an acoustooptic cell, is the Scophony scanner, first developed by the Scophony Laboratories of London during the 1930s. The Scophony scanner responds like a coherent imaging system, whereas the flying spot scanner performs like an incoherent imaging system, when the light source is spatially coherent. The Scophony response is intimately linked to the concepts of FM blur and the deflector as video spectrum bandpass filter.