Patent ID: 8335999

Claim:
A method of exposing a light pattern on a surface of light sensitive material, the method comprising: a spatial light modulator spatially modulating light beam to form a rectangular matrix exposure pattern of rows and columns of image data, wherein the rectangular matrix exposure pattern comprises contiguous sub-exposure areas, each sub-exposure area associated with a datum of the image data; wherein the columns of the rectangular matrix exposure pattern are aligned with a scan direction and the rows of the rectangular matrix pattern are aligned with a cross-scan direction; an optical shearing element modifying light output from the spatial light modulator, such that at least a first block of the exposure pattern is shifted with respect to at least a second block of the exposure pattern in a cross scan direction by an amount less than a center to center distance between two sub-exposure areas in a cross scan direction, transforming the rectangular matrix exposure pattern into a sheared exposure pattern; exposing the surface of light sensitive material in the scan direction with the light beam output from the optical shearing element, such that the surface of light sensitive material is exposed with the sheared exposure pattern; and overlapping exposed sub-areas in the cross scan direction as a result of the scanning.