In the world of digital photography sensors, technology has steadily improved over the years with various advances mostly taking place within the confines of standard CMOS sensors. Fujifilm and Panasonic have an organic sensor they have been working on, and Sony patented a curved sensor design a while back.
Well, Toshiba and Canon have jumped on the curved sensor design bandwagon, joining Sony. The patents from the two companies both approach the curved sensor design differently, but both have the same goal, to improve image quality and eliminate things like vignette from images captured by these devices.
Canon actually has two curved designs in their patent, with one being a fully curved design, and the other is mostly flat with curved edges. The interesting thing about the fully curved design from Canon is that it would require an all new mount and lens system in order for it to be used. This is because lenses would have to be redesigned to render the image correctly on a curved plane, rather than a flat one.
The Canon design featuring the flat with curved edges could in theory maybe be used with the current EF mount, though it is unclear how this might look if the sensor ever made it to market.
Sony’s fixed lens curved sensor camera never made it to market, at least not up to this point, so it remains to be seen if Canon will let these patents collect dust. But the potential here from a photography-tech perspective is very interesting.
