Four types of optical systems, a polarization optical system including an
objective lens having a high numerical aperture, a polarization optical
system including an objective lens having a low numerical aperture, a
non-polarization optical system including an objective lens having a high
numerical aperture and a non-polarization optical system including an
objective lens having a low numerical aperture, are selectively used at
the time of irradiating light from a semiconductor laser on a target disk
for measurement, and the in-plane birefringence characteristic and
perpendicular birefringence characteristic of the target disk are
separately acquired based on the amounts of received light obtained by
measuring reflected light from the target disk by a photosensor.