Techniques and an apparatus for spectrophotometer using an acoustooptic tunable filter (AO filter) are described. Stray light of an AO filter, which disturbs the precise spectral measurement, is seperated from filtered light by the RF chopping technique. System control and data processing are performed efficiently with an one-chip CPU. Scanning time, spectral resolution, and wavelength region are 0.1 sec, 4nm, 400nm-700nm, respectively.