A fast (≤0.1 ms) and compact "multicolor" scintillator-based optical soft x-ray (OSXR) array has been developed for time- and space-resolved measurements of the electron temperature [Te (R,t)] profiles in magnetically confined fusion plasmas. The 48-channel tangential multicolor OSXR prototype was tested on the National Spherical Torus Experiment. Each sight line views the same plasma volume at the midplane (0≤ra≤1), in three distinct energy ranges determined by beryllium foils with different thicknesses. A tangential view of the toroidally (circular) symmetric plasma allows an Abel inversion of the line-integrated SXR brightness to obtain the x-ray emissivity profiles which are then used to constrain the reconstruction of the fast Te (R,t). The first assessment of the electron temperature is obtained by modeling the slope of the continuum radiation with the ideal double-foil method using both the line-integrated intensity measurements as well as the inverted SXR emissivity profiles. © 2007 American Institute of Physics.