Fourier analysis can be applied to an anisoplanatic optical system, if we define the modulation transfer function of such a system as the four-dimensional Fourier transform of its space -variant point spread function. We show that this approach can be used to estimate the bandwidth of the output image, and thereby provides a way of determining the sampling rates required for computer simulation of such systems. We also show that the computer calculation of the image is less timeconsuming to do in the spatial domain than in the frequency domain.