Canon Designing Lenses for Curved Sensors

Patents are surfacing for lenses designed around a curved sensor, such as this one that includes embodiments for 35mm, 50mm and 85mm f/1.2 and f/1.0 embodiments.

The designs look to be very simple relative to today’s soup-can-of-glass designs that are more complex in part due to attempts to correct chromatic aberrations caused by attempting to project onto a flat surface.

Ever wanted to know what the design of an 85mm f/1.0 lens might look like? We never did because we assumed it wasn’t practical to do. But now you have the design above.

If this technology comes to market, expect things to get complex fast. Many such design ideas would require the curvature of the sensor to change based on changing factors. This patent doesn’t address this, but instead states that the objective was merely to create a big aperture with a relatively small objective lens where there is a fixed sensor curvature of -70.

The patent was first surfaced by An Image on a Sensor.