Canon Throws Patent App at Horizontal Lines Focusing Problem

Canon R5 users eventually come to that moment when their camera won’t focus on a target. It is then they discover it’s optimized to figure out focus from the visible vertical lines of a target. An object with only clear horizontal lines? Nope, invisible.

Rumors regarding the coming R3 camera hold that it will have phase detect sensing in both vertical and horizontal, but a patent application surfaced today by Canon Watch shows a clever way of half-assing this: using the in-body stabilization (IBIS) system to rotate the image momentarily enough to get phase information back on a different axis.

There are a series of IBIS-related patents that Canon has been churning out over the past couple of years that might start becoming relevant as they’ve actually introduced IBIS-equipped bodies starting 14 months ago. The one IBIS-related feature users knew about and hoped would make an appearance remains absent: super-resolution via the stacking of IBIS-offset images.