The total light flux through a small aperture, for application in time-resolved optical absorption spectrophotometry, e.g., pulse radiolysis and flash photolysis, has been increased. This was achieved by redesigning the ellipsoidal mirror condenser of the high-intensity xenon short-arc lamp system. The essence is replacement of part of the ellipsoidal mirror, between the lamp arc and the nearest ellipsoid vertex, by a hemisphere with the first focus point of the ellipsoid as center. This results in a smaller beam focus spot, shown by calculation and experiment. A reliable alignment procedure, including the use of a smoke vessel to visualize the beam, is described. A relative increase in the total light flux through a 0.5-cm-diam aperture in the beam focus up to 50% has been obtained with a 450-W xenon short-arc lamp at a current of 25 A. Comparative measurements, using different aperture sizes in the beam focus, with the original ellipsoidal mirror condenser system and the new design are discussed. The improvement in signal to noise by a factor of 1.2 is particularly useful in transient absorption experiments where many small signals with poor signal-to-noise ratio have to be averaged. The new condenser can save 33% in time and cost of investigated materials, and decrease the relative effect of interference and other disturbances. The 50% higher light flux at no additional cost of energy may easily find application in other optical instruments, e.g. irradiators and fiber optic illuminators.