We report a novel and fast method for converting a digital, complex Fresnel hologram into a phase-only hologram. Briefly, the pixels in the complex hologram are scanned sequentially in a row by row manner. The odd and even rows are scanned from opposite directions, constituting to a bidirectional error diffusion process. The magnitude of each visited pixel is forced to be a constant value, while preserving the exact phase value. The resulting error is diffused to the neighboring pixels that have not been visited before. The resulting novel phase-only hologram is called the bidirectional error diffusion (BERD) hologram. The reconstructed image from the BERD hologram exhibits high fidelity as compared with those obtained with the original complex hologram. (C) 2013 Optical Society of America