A novel off-axis illumination system has been developed to collect and focus light from an arc lamp onto the imager. The system consists of a sphere-ellipsoidal reflector, a hyperboloidal reflector and a tilted light pipe. The sphere-ellipsoidal reflector synthesizes two main light beams and focuses the light to reduce the entendue value. The hyperboloidal reflector transforms the shape of beam into a tilted light pipe to gain high collection efficiency and uniformity. The modeling result obtained by LightTools and ZEMAX shows that the system can illuminate the small imagers with high uniformity and collection efficiency.