It’s Friday – time for another Nikon patents update. First, a new patent application for a 10mm f/2 wide angle lens with a 155° angle of view:
Next patent application 20110080659 is for a 18mm f/2.8 DX format (28mm equivalent). This lens is not designed for F-mount (back focus is 19mm) and is compact (58mm from image plane to front element) – probably for Nikon’s upcoming mirrorless system:
Japanese patent application 2010-283422 is for a sensor in the camera that will keep track if the camera was dropped or mishandled:
… a user cannot easily confirm the carefulness of the way of handling a digital camera corresponding to the history of the way of handling the digital camera.
Solution: Based on the number of times of determining that a pressure applied to a camera body 2, which is detected by a pressure sensor 32 exceeds a first threshold …
Multiple patents (2010-276744 – 2010-276747) were filed again in Japan for the 80-400mm lens:
Japanese patent application 2010-271418 describes Nikon’s mirrorless mount:
“To provide an optical unit, a camera body, a coupling structure of camera body and optical unit, and a camera, preventing looseness of the optical unit to the camera body even when the optical unit detachably mounted to the camera body is heavy.”
Nikon patent application 20070248345 is for a camera/system hat detecting faces in an image wherein it uses the detected face locations/areas to determine which phase-detection AF point to use (that is, instead of using gruelingly slow contrast AF to focus the faces it will detect the face then use the nearest phase-detection AF point).
