I'm debating this with a good friend....
Say you have something like a 650nm that puts out something like a square or rectangle beam by nature. Once you have a good collimator lens and have the beam as good as it can get - and lets say for the sake of argument it is solid 6mm X 4mm beam, if you put a centered 3mm round pinhole right before the scanners, would you have a consistent round beam after the scanners? Not counting divergence and scanner mirror angles. Just a round beam for the most part?
I say it would tend to stay round. The debate is that it is the nature of the square beam at the laser that will make it go back towards square after the scanners. Not being an expert I can't say which is correct, but it just seems to me that clipping off everything but the center of the beam into a 3mm circle, it would stay that way for the most part.
Just thought I would get some feedback before I try the pinhole trick and then find out somehow the beam isn't what I expected.
Gene