Scophony Spatial Light Modulator

Abstract

An alternative to the conventional flying-spot scanner architecture is the Scophony scanner. The Scophony scanner uses the same optical elements as the more familiar flying-spot scanner: a rotating polygon mirror, an acousto-optic (A/O) modulator, and a laser light source. The flying-spot scanner is designed to construct its image a pixel at a time; no more than one pixel is illuminated at any given instant. The Scophony scanner is designed to image a broad swath of the A/0 modulator's acoustic pulses onto the photoreceptor. Many pixels are illuminated at any given instant in the Scophony scanner. The result is a scanner with a coherent imaging response. This coherent response implies that the phase of the modulator's electronic drive signal for a given pixel profoundly influences the formation of the neighboring pixels at the scanner image plane. This coherent response enables electronic manipulation of the video drive signal to have significant impact on the optical imaging performance of the scanner. In this paper, two electronic manipulation schemes are pro-posed for doubling the resolution of the Scophony scanner, one scheme for analog video signals and one scheme for binary digital video signals. Each scheme gives superior contrast ratio performance when compared with the flying-spot scanner.