In this patent application (2024-141604), Canon is looking at developing an electrochromic filter that uses organic elements. The primary goal of this patent application is to reduce the power requirement for using the filter.
By the looks of the patent application, Canon has designs to use this in cameras, while it's not specifically mentioned – I suspect this is to perform an electronic shutter operation. This shutter would operate insanely fast and would be completely silent. Since the shutter would not move as a slit across the sensor it would allow for unlimited flash sync speeds, and since it wouldn't have the live sensor readout rate of an electronic shutter, the shutter would simply be on / off.
This would make it as good as a global shutter for photography.
Canon does this by sandwiching layers diffused with tetrabutylammonium propylene carbonate solution. Yes, I created this article just to say that compound once in my life. It seems that the layer can hold the state, so it only has to apply power to switch the state between off and on and doesn't need power to maintain the state.
At first, I thought this was for ND applications, but the following camera diagrams made it obvious that Canon was thinking of this as a shutter operation, essentially moving the shutter into the lenses in the one exactly – similar to how leaf shutters operated with medium format backs. The other example (b) shows the filter (101) under the glass filter (109) in the more traditional location of the shutter in an ILC.
Why would this be cool? Imagine a silent shutter without the drawbacks of an electronic shutter or the loss of image quality of a global shutter.
As with all patent applications, this is putting a looking glass into Canon's ongoing research and may never end up in an actual product.
Japan Patent Application 2024-141604
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