Canon Touchscreen DSLR Patent Revealed

A patent has been found that was filed by Canon and provides details of a touchscreen DSLR camera. Filed back in April and approved in October this year, the patent describes a DSLR camera where you can easily manipulate the settings by touching the screen rather than the buttons.

The patent was found to be just 13 pages long. One of the first things that comes to mind with a touchscreen on a camera is that when you look through the viewfinder, your face is actually touching the screen. To prevent settings being changed by accident the system can be programmed with what eye you look through the viewfinder with and when you look through it, the parts of the screen that your face will touch have the touchscreen portion disabled. When moving away the portion of the screen then can be touched again.

I won’t go in to the arguments of why a touchscreen is needed here because there are some who will hate the idea and some who will like it. Instead, lets just cover what it actually does and then you can make your own mind up.

Two of the main features of the touchscreen are to control shutter speed and aperture values. The patent describes sliding your finger vertically to adjust the aperture while a horizontal slide will change the shutter speed.

Other handy features include a focus detection area, exposure correction value, flash adjustment, metering modes, deive mode, ISO, auto focus, white balance and exposure control.

Although all of these functions can be accessed through menus and scroll wheels on your camera, it seems that the touchscreen is built to increase speed of changing settings. By listing all the functions in an easy to use grid menu, you can quickly access the settings you need by a tap or slide on the screen.

As for now, this is just a patent which doesn’t guarantee it will be added to a DSLR in the future, but it could be the direction that Canon are heading with their cameras.

Patent Via: PhotographyBay