The Fuji Imaging Plate (IP) is a 2-Dimensional X-ray detector on which a latent X-ray image is stored as a distribution of color centers in a photo-stimulable phosphor(BaFBr:Eu) screen. It has excellent characteristics such as a wide dynamic range of five or more digits and an order of magnitude higher sensitivity than X-ray film. Thus it has been actively used in the field of X-ray single crystal structure analysis.

For polymer studies, 2-D information is useful to analyse a sample's orientation or periodic structure, and some system such as 2-D position sensitive detector (PSD) are widely used. But in spite of the superior performance of the IP which will give significant advantages in various measurements, few applications have been reported in this field, because most conventional IP based systems are specialized for the single crystal structure analysis,

Therefore we developed the R-AXIS II D (Rigaku Automated X-ray Imaging System II D), an IP reader for general X-ray diffractometry which has a removable IP in order for exposure with external X-ray optics, and software which converts 2-D data to conventional 2theta-intensity or beta-intensity data for analysis of crystallinity or orientation. In this paper, we report the performance of R-AXIS II D and its applications to polymer studies and thin film analyses.