Appeal No. 1998-2009
Application No. 08/508,250
With respect to independent claims 1 and 5, the Examiner
reasons the Tatsuno discloses the claimed invention, as
depicted in Figure 17, except that Tatsuno uses a single lens
instead of the claimed pair of lenses. The Examiner notes
that Kobayashi discloses an objective lens system including a
pair of lenses
(3 and 2 in Figure 1) for focusing light from a laser light
source into a spot (final rejection-page 2). The Examiner
states:
To one of ordinary skill in the art at the time of
the invention it would have been obvious to replace
the objective lens of Tatsuno with the lens system
as taught by Kobayashi for focusing the light from
the light source into a spot on the optical
modulator thereby improving accuracy over a range of
temperature and distance variations while
maintaining a desired imaging magnification ratio
and maintaining the distance between the object and
the image (see column 4 lines 23-30). Note in
example 1 of Kobayashi the focal length of the
collimating lens f =26.45 and the focal length of the
C
objective lens f =3.401, therefore f +f =29.951 whichO C O
is greater than the distance between the lenses,
D’=12.90. [Final rejection-pages 2 and 3.]
Appellants argue strenuously that, even if Tatsuno and
Kobayashi were combined, all claim limitations would not be
met. In particular, lens 3 of Kobayashi is not a collimating
-5-
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