Canon Patent Application: Multiple lens camera system

Canon has submitted a patent application for a multiple lens camera system, atypically what we see on smartphones.  This looks similar in structure to what the light camera L16 system is, with multiple lenses at different focal lengths.  It appears to use 8 actual cameras to form the image.  There's a TON of different optical designs being demonstrated on this patent, and we'll go through some of them, but the list is exhaustive.  Canon is looking at a way of providing zoom with these small composite cameras.

All the image heights for the lenses seem to be 3.88mm which would mean it's for a 1/2.3" sensor size.  that has a crop factor of 5.6, we'll show the relative full frame focal length in parenthesis.  The size of the lenses are really small, between 27mm to 17.91mm, perhaps too large for a smartphone, but certainly could end up on a miniaturized powershot camera.

• 5.2mm F2.88 (29mm)
• 7.5mm f2.88 (42mm)
• 10.50mm f2.88 (59mm)
• 15.00mm f2.88 (84mm)
• 4.4mm F2.88 (25mm)
• 8.1mm f2.88 (45mm)

As with all our patent applications, we don't know if it will end up in an actual product sometime, but it shows areas of Canon R&D.

Japan Patent Application 2018-200484