Patents, patents and more patents..

I decided to create this post because the amount of people reporting on patents seems to be growing lately, quite possibly because there's no other news at this time, and so may as well post something ;)

We look at the Japan patent applications first and foremost because it's the leading edge to what Canon is researching.  The US patent office gets these patents, months after the fact (or at times years before it's published as an application).

The patent process for a company like Canon is large, and very expensive.  I can't imagine the staff required to handle all the patent applications that canon submits, which exceeds 9,000 per year.  They do this globally which means they are posted to the US, Europe, Russia, Asia, patent offices as well.

We do our best to filter through these patents and find ones we feel are relevant.  Out of batches of 600-900 patents each batch, we filter that down to 50-75 interesting patents, and then filter that down futher to the ones we write up about and post.  These batches are around 3 months after the patent is published by the Japan patent office.  As an example, we're looking at September's patents now.  Part of the delay is the fact that there is translation done to the patents.

What we show is only a extremely small subset to what Canon is doing at any one particular point in time and many of the items we show may never make it into an actual product.  However, I feel it shows that canon is working on issues and trying to make photography better for us, the consumer, even though at times it looks like they aren't doing as much as they should.

Enjoy reading what we're publishing over the next few days, and happy holidays!