The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Apr. 07, 2009
Filed:
Dec. 02, 2003
Koichi Yoshikawa, Kanagawa, JP;
Koichi Yoshikawa, Kanagawa, JP;
Sony Corporation, , JP;
Abstract
An image pickup apparatus is able to shoot an image of a wide range by a plurality of image pickup units, it is able to obtain excellent image quality and it can be miniaturized. An image pickup apparatuscomprises a plurality of image pickup unitsincluding an image pickup deviceand a front lens, the adjacent image pickup unitsbeing located in such a manner that image pickup areas overlap each other and the image pickup units being located so as to satisfy a conditional equation AL<fD (1) where a cross-section passing a viewpoint center, an image pickup deviceand a front lensis created in the direction in which the image areas of the adjacent image pickup portions overlap with each other, a cross-section length of the image pickup deviceis assumed to be A, a cross-section length of the front lensis assumed to be D, a length from the front lensto the image pickup deviceis assumed to be L and a focal length which results from synthesizing the whole of the lenses within the image pickup unitcontaining the front lensis assumed to be f and that the viewpoint center of each image pickup unitmay lie within a sphere with a diameter of 20 mm.