A two‐dimensional, tangentially viewing, soft‐x‐ray pinhole camera has been fabricated to provide internal shape measurements on the PBX‐M tokamak. It consists of a scintillator at the focal plane of a foil‐filtered pinhole camera, which is, in turn, fiber‐optically coupled to an intensified framing video camera (&Dgr;t≥3 ms). Automated data acquisition is performed on a stand‐alone image processing system, and data archiving and retrieval take place on an optical disk video recorder. The derivation of the poloidal emission distribution from the measured image is done by fitting to model profiles.