Apparatus for detecting inclination of optical card.

摘要

There is provided an optical card inclination detecting apparatus (100) comprising: a card holder (2) supported to a guiding mechanism (12) so as to be reciprocated and having a card holding portion (21); an optical head (6) which has a tracking function for allowing the optical head to follow recording tracks on the optical card and performs at least either one of recording and reproduction of information onto/from the optical card; and a detector (104 SIMILAR 109) to detect an angle of inclination of the optical card held by the card holder to a moving direction of the card holder on the basis of an amount of change of a tracking signal which is used in the tracking operation of the optical head in at least a one-directional movement of the card holder supporting the optical card. A photo detector (121) to detect the reflected light from an optical card comprises two light receiving portions (121a, 121b) having the same special shape such as isosceles triangle or right-angled triangle. These light receiving portions are arranged so as to confront vertexes of the isosceles triangles or to confront oblique sides of the right-angled triangles. With this structure, the dynamic range of the track error signal can be set to a large value.