Canon Patent Application: Dual Sensor Camera

This patent application has some novel applications.  One of the main goals are to provide single shot dual image shooting for HDR, with both sensors exposing at different exposure levels.  The other applications involve smoother video as both sensors would capture video at the same time.  Other problems it solves is when you are doing for instance a 5 shot bracket, and one of your bracketted shots is a long exposure shot, in which the camera has to do LENR (long exposure noise reduction) on the image, which takes considerable time - this would allow the camera to switch to the secondary sensor, while the first sensor is processing the LENR of the long exposure image.

I could l see this being used in multiple novel applications.  Consider a sensor tuned for low light or high FPS shooting and another tuned for high MP shooting.  The ability to switch in between sensors in the same camera at a flick of a button? Now that would be kind of amazing.

Generally from the patent, the description of the above diagram is;

The half mirror 103 splits the imaging light beam (subject light beam) that has passed through the imaging optical system 102 into a first light beam and a second light beam. The first image sensor 104 and the second image sensor 105 receive the first light beam and the second light beam, respectively. The first image sensor 104 and the second image sensor 105 are constituted by a CCD image sensor, a CMOS image sensor, or the like. The first image sensor 104 and the second image sensor 105 have an image pickup pixel and a focus detection pixel for autofocus using a phase difference detection method. The MPU 106 includes a CPU and a memory that stores a program executed by the CPU, and functions as a control unit that controls the overall operation of the camera body 101. Further, the MPU 106 controls the driving of the photographing lens 102b via the lens driving motor 108.
 

Japan Patent Application 2019186594