Development of direct fringe printer for computer-generated holograms

TLDR: In this paper, a direct fringe printer is developed, which consists of a laser, an X-Y stage and a liquid crystal panel as a spatial light modulator, and it can produce 192 Mega-pixel holograms with 2.8-micron pitch within 40 minutes, three times faster than the previous one.

Abstract: It becomes quite easy to calculate over one hundred million pixels computer-generated hologram of three-dimensional object, even with normal personal computers. On the other hand, it is not so easy to output the calculated result as a hologram that must have micron order resolution for practical three-dimensional display. We have developed a direct fringe printer, which consists of a laser, an X-Y stage and a liquid crystal panel as a spatial light modulator. A fractional part of the entire holographic fringe is displayed on the liquid crystal panel, and the demagnified image of it is recorded on a holographic plate. Then the plate is translated by the x-y stage to write next part of the fringe. We have made some improvements on our previous system. We achieved to print 192 Mega-pixel hologram with 2.8-micron pitch within 40 minutes, three times faster than the previous one. We have also printed 768 Mega-pixel hologram and the full-color rainbow hologram.