A digitally controlled programmable optical beam shaper that uses a two-dimensional (2-D) small-tilt micromirror device is introduced. The optical intensity profile at any spatial position can be independently modified by use of a macropixel incorporated with binary pulse-width modulation. An experimental proof-of-concept optical beam shaper with a commercial 2-D digital micromirror device has shown that the spatial profile of a He-Ne laser beam can be digitally manipulated. Investigation of the analog intensity control showed 256-level nonlinear degamma behavior with a measured 24.5-dB optical contrast ratio and a 10-bit spatial resolution. The performance of this tunable optical beam shaper is limited by the dimensions of the micromirror, the intermirror distance, the size of the optical beam, the number of bits used to control the micromirror, the diffraction effect, and the quality of the imaging optical system. © 2003 Optical Society of America.