In this work, a rotating compensator sampling for spectroscopic imaging ellipsometry (SIE) is presented and demonstrated by characterization of a SiO 2 nanofilm pattern on Si substrate. Experiment results within spectrum of 400-700 nm show that the rotating compensator sampling is valid for SIE to obtain the ellipsometric angle distributions ψ (x, y, λ) and Δ (x, y, λ) over the thin film pattern, the sampling times of ψ (x, y) and Δ (x, y) with 576 × 768 pixels under each wavelength is less than 8 s, the precision of fitting thickness of SiO 2 is about 0.2 nm and the lateral resolution is 60.9 μm × 24.6 μm in the parallel and perpendicular direction with respect to the incident plane.