The influence of wavefront quality of reference beams on the reconstruction quality of holographic recordings is investigated by numerical simulation.A physical model of recording and readout of Fourier transform holograms is built up to study reconstruction quality with various reference waves such as general plane wave,Gaussian wave and speckle wave.The quality is quantitatively evaluated using the loss of signal to noise ratio(LSNR)of the readout images.The simulation results show that plane and Gaussian reference waves could successfully record and readout high-quality holographic images with LSNR lower than 0.6 dB,but the speckle reference led to quality deterioration of reconstructed images with LSNR as high as 5 dB.It will be difficult to realize effective high-density data storage by speckle reference beam.In order to implement high-quality and high-density holographic storage,the reference beam must be optimized.