A compact momentum-balanced internal optical scanning mechanism is provided for a wide angle camera used in photo reconnaissance and the like, in which a large high resolution but not fully populated array is used to provide full scene coverage with high pixel densities, in which sharpness is maintained and in which the image can be scanned without vibration due to momentum compensation so that the image may be shifted on the focal plane array in such a manner that images focused on a dark portion of the array will move to an active portion of the array, with the sequential read out of the information concatenated into high resolution full scene image data.