A
progressive scan architecture for displaying a two-dimensional image by alternately scanning two or more
laser beams, one after the other with a time
delay between adjacent beams. The beams are arranged to become incident upon a polygon
scanner in a row with an approximately uniform spatial separation and an approximately equal angle between adjacent beams. The polygon
scanner scans horizontally and a
galvanometer-driven mirror scans vertically. Adjacent lines are progressively scanned in sequence from top to bottom, which advantageously reduces or eliminates psycho-visual effects and is tolerant of non-linearities in the vertical
scanner, allowing use of a low-cost galvo mirror. Typically, the beams in the row are arranged in pairs, and only one beam from each pair will be scanning at any one time. Embodiments are described in which the
duty cycle is slightly less than 50% and the
laser illumination is switched between two interleaved beam scans thereby allowing a single modulator to be used for both beams which provides significant cost advantages and improves
system efficiency. For full-color images, each of the beams described can incorporate separate red, green and blue (RGB) components which are individually modulated by separate red, green, and blue modulators. The
system can be scaled up with one or more additional pairs of beams to improve resolution and / or increase pixel count without requiring a high-speed polygon scanner or a highly-linear galvo scanner. Furthermore, the height of each
facet in the polygon mirror need be only one
beam diameter and its length need only be two beam diameters, which allows the
system to approach the minimum pixel size attainable, which is useful to provide high efficiency and high brightness in the image.