Apple has become well known for patenting ideas they never bring to their products, but this new camera patent may actually be added onto the next iPhones in the coming years and could really vamp up the power and performance of the iPhone camera for the average user.
The iPhone camera is already one of the best in the industry, scaling past most Android devices and only getting hit hard by the Lumia 1020 and other high-end Nokia devices with incredibly high megapixel cameras. Even still, Apple’s camera is seen as the best camera for just taking a photo and making sure it look great, without having to add one hundred settings and get the right exposure levels.
This new patent essentially offers a way to refocus the image after the user has taken the photo, we have seen this feature on the odd Lytro camera. This means a photo can have multiple focuses and allows the user to change the focus if they picked the wrong face or image.
Apple has just updated their camera on the iPhone 5S, offering a dual-LED flash and a longer-range lens to capture more in the photo. Putting chunky Lytro refocus technology into the very slim iPhone may take a while to actually finesse and we doubt the iPhone 6 will have this feature.
The patent has been worked on by Steve Jobs before his death and it looks like the ex-CEO tried his hardest to “revolutionise photography” amongst many of his other big moves in the world before he died, most of which Apple has not worked on since, especially the TV project Jobs had apparently cracked.
As always with Apple patents, we wouldn’t get your hopes up on having the Lytro camera feature anytime soon – in fact, we may never see the camera be able to do this, it may be so far out of reach alongside Apple’s current efforts of getting the iPhone even thinner.