A Touchpad instead of a Lens Focus Ring? That’s Canon’s latest idea

We have long witnessed a rotating focus ring on the digital camera lenses but now it seems the cameras adapt technologies from other machines. A recent patent application in Japan shows a new interchangeable lens design with no focus ring, but a touchpad instead.

Canon is up to design right that thing out for its lenses. The company, in a patent application, has illustrated an interchangeable lens that has a large circular touch panel on the side of the lens. It’s supposed to be used with your thumb when you hold the lens along with the camera.

In the application, while briefing the problem, Canon offered to provide a lens that is advantageous in terms of operability with a touch control panel on the exterior. The user can perform a touch operation clockwise or counterclockwise, to move the focus forward or backward.

This will replace the focus ring that you normally use with the same hand but both, the thumb and fingers. Unlike physically rotating the ring on the lens, the touch panel will allow performing a simple rotating gesture to focus. Apart from its function, the touchpad is usually faster in most operations. It can offer more than just a single function based on multiple gesture techniques.

It’s also worth noting that this is not the first hardware Canon has implemented with touch-based control. Apart from the common touch screen on cameras, Canon once provided a Touch Bar on its EOS R series that didn’t go well among users. The reason of it was mostly the poor implementation.

Similarly, this touch-based focus control looks really good and intuitive on paper. However, it depends on how Canon implements the solution in a real-life product.