Canon filed a patent for a 24-120mm f/3.5-5.6 IS lens. Most likely a lens for full-frame sensors.
Canon filed a patent for a 50mm f/1.4 lens. The patent literature refers to AF speed improvements.
The current EF 50mm f/1.4 was released back in 1993. A replacement could be on its way. It’s likely we have the patent for Canon’s next EF 50mm f/1.4 lens.
Canon filed a patent for an EF 600mm f/4 DO IS lens, i.e. a lens with diffractive optical elements.
The Canon patent describes a body cap that keeps the lens mount of a DSLR lubricated. To be honest I can’t grab the utility of this, except that it could concern the electric contacts (keeping them clean) . Since we get this patent literature translated by a machine, I am never sure the translated words are any helpful.
A pretty interesting patent. It appears Canon is working on the next generation of the technology introduced with the EOS 70D, i.e. Dual Pixel Auto-Focus. With a difference: this is Hexa Pixel Auto-Focus, and AF is obtained by plane phase difference of 16 sub-pixels. Not bad, eh? Might be the next game changing technology by Canon.
Moreover, and if I got the machine translated patent description right, this patent may be related to another Canon patent for a video camera featuring light-field technology. The patent also mentions AF microadjustment, but I am not sure I got it right: according to the patent literature, it seems to be a technology for automatic auto-focus microadjustment. As usual, given the hard to understand patent literature, any interpretative help is welcome.
Canon filed a patent for what appears to be a Lytro-like technology. The patent refers to a “compound eye” lens, i.e. an optic element with several lenses, each having a different focal distance. Such a device is capable of refocusing images after being taken.
This is called Light-field photography, and Wikipedia has a definition for it:
A light field camera (also known as plenoptic camera) captures information about the intensity of light in a scene, and also captures information about the direction that the light rays are traveling in space. One type of light field camera uses an array of micro-lenses placed in front of an otherwise conventional image sensor; to sense intensity, color, and directional information.
Light-field photography is part of computational photography, and again we have a good definition:
Computational photography or computational imaging refers to digital image capture and processing techniques that use digital computation instead of optical processes. Computational photography can improve the capabilities of a camera, or introduce features that were not possible at all with film based photography, or reduce the cost or reduce the size of camera elements. […] Light field cameras use novel optical elements to capture three dimensional scene information which can then be used to produce 3D images, enhanced of depth-of-field, and selective de-focusing (or “post focus”). Enhanced depth-of-field reduces the need for mechanical focusing systems
However, the patent refers to a video camera. This makes everything more interesting. I couldn’t find any reference to a sensor technology in the patent description. I wonder if this is going to feature a new sensor technology. I am not an expert in this domain, so any help is welcome.
The patent was spotted by Egami (translation).
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