Patent 7173746 was granted and assigned to Samsung on February, 2007 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A multi-beam scanning apparatus has a lateral magnification M in a sub-scanning direction from a light source to a scanned surface satisfying 8.5≦M≦9.5, and a lateral magnification M2 in the sub-scanning direction from a light deflector to the scanned surface satisfying 0.5≦M2≦2.0. The multi-beam scanning apparatus can use a light source having a relatively low power.