The invention aims to provide a coordinate input apparatus having high detection reliability and high efficiency and to control the influence of ambient light using a simple structure. The apparatus detects a light spot flashing on and off in a predetermined cycle and incident at a desired position on a coordinate input screen, and includes a detection device having photoelectric conversion elements corresponding to N pixels for detecting a light spot coordinate. The difference between signals from photoelectric elements in light emission state and in light non-emission state at each N pixel is found, and the smaller of the difference signals of the m-th pixel having the maximum difference signal is set as a threshold value. Effective pixels are identified based on the threshold value, and the coordinate is calculated by using the difference data of the selected effective pixels.