A new magneto-optical (MO) imaging system for high-throughput characterization of combinatorial magnetic thin films has been developed. The instrument allows us to measure both Faraday rotation and ellipticity maps at various wavelengths, and at different magnetic fields for wide variety of materials. We confirmed that the system possesses enough spatial resolution and sensitivity for detecting MO signals of individual pixels contained in a combinatorial library with a dimension of <7 mm x 9 mm. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.