A new imaging technique based on scatter at right angles from tissue has been investigated. Separate transmitting and receiving transducers are employed. The transmitting transducer generates a cylindrical wavefront that converges to a line focus in the object. A receiving transducer, aligned coaxially with the line focus, detects the ultrasound waves scattered at 90° from structures in the object. Because of the high degree of cylindrical focusing, the scatter is treated as if it arises from points on or very near the line focus. This allows the use of a ranging approach similar to that employed in conventional pulse–echo imaging. A tomographic image is generated by translating or rotating the two transducers as a unit while appropriately displaying the scatter information. This approach eliminates the depth‐of‐field problem inherent in pulse–echo imaging without sacrificing the speed or simplicity of the imaging process. The distribution of ultrasound in the field of the cylindrical transducer is treated theoretically for cylinder angles ranging from 30° to 360°. Experimental verification of theory was performed using a 120° cylinder. Here the full width at half maximum of the amplitude of the main lobe was 0.5 λ by 2.3 λ (0.15 mm × 0.7 mm at 5 MHz). An experimental scatter scanner is described, and images of a simple phantom and aninvitrotissue sample are given.