ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a comprehensive visual understanding of the effects of changing the incident beam width, the incident beam offset angle, which is the angle the incident beam is offset from the x-axis, and the number of mirror facets on a polygonal scanner without regard to performance in terms of resolution. There are three distinct topics associated with pre-objective polygonal scanning systems. The topics are: equations and coordinates of a polygonal scanning system; instantaneous center-of-scan; and stationary ghost images outside the image format. The visualization of the effects of changing the controlling parameters of an optical scanning system helps in its design, while, in particular, the explicit coordinates and equations eliminate manual or computer-aided iterative techniques. Ghost images are caused by both specular and scattered reflected rays from optical surfaces and are always unwanted, especially within the image format of the scanned field image plane.
