A full-field display for spectrally dispersive imaging optics, particularly as a design tool for evaluating optical designs including designs with freeform optical surfaces, includes a ray tracing module arranged for modeling local aberrations throughout the image field of the spectrometer and a display module that converts values of the modeled local aberrations throughout the image field into representative symbols. The spectrometer field has a first spatial dimension corresponding to a length dimension of an input and a second spectral dimension corresponding to the dispersion of the input. The representative symbols are plotted in an array having a first axis corresponding to the first spatial dimension of the image field and a second axis corresponding to the second spectral dimension of the image field.