We first managed to combine the advantages of low-dispersion layer optics with the near-paraxial design of ultraflat microoptical elements—and exploit them for high-precision shaping and as diagnostics of femtosecond-laser pulses with durations of a few optical cycles—with thin-film structures fabricated by mask-supported vapor deposition.1 With refractive, reflective, and hybrid micro-axicons (conical lenses) consisting of dielectric, metallic, or compound layers, we demonstrated that ultrashort-pulsed Bessel-like nondiffracting beams (known as ‘X pulses’ or ‘light bullets,’ described by Bessel functions) can be generated easily in linear optical setups.2–4 The unique propagation properties of such beams, including extended depth of focus, high tilt tolerance, axial-field components, and selfreconstruction,5 make them very attractive for applications such as highly robust Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensors,6 multichannel materials processing,7 or 2D autocorrelation.1, 8 However, adaptive functionality is urgently required to improve the dynamic measurement range (for instance, by encoding the sub-beams of a wavefront sensor), address individual channels for more flexible processing, or significantly enhance the resolution of interferometric or holographic metrology through the use of additional phase-step procedures. Unfortunately, digital-mirror displays with large numbers of small subapertures are typically limited to amplitude switching and suffer from heat-transfer problems. Liquid-crystal spatial light modulators (LC-SLMs), on the other hand, enable phase and amplitude programming. They were first applied to temporal pulse shaping using Fourier-plane optical processors9 (where pulse duration is not important). However, transmitting LCSLMs exhibit crucial pulse distortions that become apparent as dispersion in the substrate and liquid-crystal layer. We recently achieved important improvements by introducing new types of liquid-crystal-on-silicon spatial light modulators (LCoS-SLMs). Their substrate dispersion is eliminated by working in reflection (liquid-crystal layer on a mirror). Figure 1. Experimental setup for programming micro-optical functionality into gray-value maps of a liquid-crystal-on-silicon spatial light modulator (LCoS-SLM). The image shows generation of an array of needle beams for multichannel processing.