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Dr. No | 758 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Dr. No
Authored by: dio gratia on Sunday, October 14 2012 @ 11:48 PM EDT

The remark was directed to cell phones and early smart phones without front cameras. You could note iPhones are not listed in the complaint as infringing devices only the iPad3 and MacBook Pro. This has a bearing:

From the Description of the Preferred Embodiment.

In an application such as providing illumination for a video camera, feedback circuit 160 measures the video output signal from the camera and provides a feedback signal 260 that allows adjustment of the light output pf LEDs 150 in order to optimize the video signal. In one such embodiment, as shown in FIG. 5, the controlled LED light source is integrated into a handheld camcorder 500. In one such embodiment, the video camera circuit also provides pulse sync signal 170 in order to synchronize the light output to the video light gathering time windows. In another such embodiment, feedback circuit 160 measures the color balance of the video output signal, and provides separate feedback intensity control for each of a plurality of (e.g., two or three) separate groups of color LEDs, for example, red, green, and blue. In one embodiment, green LEDs such as part number NSPG 500S and blue LEDs such as part number NSPB 500S, both available from Nichia Chemical Industries Ltd. of Japan and Nichia America Corp., 3775 Hempland Road, Mountville Pa., 17554 are used, and red LEDs such as part number HLMP-C115 available from Hewlett Packard Company.
It's my understanding from comments by someone at Datacolor that white LEDs are used for the Apple LCD displays backlights including Retina displays. Retina displays are the only feature I could see unique to both the iPad3 and MacBook Pro (with Retina Display). There are two types of LED display backlights, either using white LEDs, or color component (RGB) LEDs that would be amenable to the method for the video camera light described above.

The LED backlit LCD displays use something called IPS (In Plane Switching) Technology from Samsung to increase the contrast ratios resulting in more accurate remapping color temperatures in the pixel domain using color look up tables. Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) to individual color LEDs isn't used to control video camera illumination color balance however.

There are several limits to using the LCD display as a video light even with RGB LED backlights individually controlled by PWM. It boils down to not knowing the color content of the LCD display unless it is intentionally fixed (e.g. white). There's also the issue of not knowing the reflective index of objects or the scene in the video camera field of view.

It's likely that the patent neither produces a useful effect for the described embodiment or isn't practicable for the above two reasons. If Apple indeed uses white backlight LEDs they wouldn't infringe anyway although you could imagine someone writing software to white out your screen and using the increased dynamic range of an IPS display in conjunction with the brightness control (which does have 256 levels) to approximate the purported effect. The lack of useful information on your screen makes it impractical just as it would be for RGB backlight LEDs.

iSight cameras purportedly use an ambient light sensor that looks like a really tiny dot to control automatic screen brightness. It's actually separate than the video image array sensor. It happens to be collocated with the image array sensor because it's used to control synthetic aperture (image array sensor sensitivity). The use of a video camera to control screen brightness is a bugaboo. It's purpose is controlling illumination color balance.

Were these suppositions to hold true Apple would likely have no trouble convincing a reasonable jury that they do not infringe. Likely only a troll would try to proceed to trial in the face of discovery or expert testimony even should they find their own expert witness with an as creative or at least confusing explanation as Oracle used for symbolic references. There is no readily apparent use for a video camera in practicing the patent other than described above in an apparently unpracticed embodiment and an NPE can't compete with practitioners of the art or closest arts for expertise. You could imagine putting on a credible defense might be viewed as paramount.

I used to be employed as a digital video engineer at Compression Labs in the early 80's designing video compression equipment. This predates their foray as Forgent Networks, CLI's successor in interest, claiming patent infringement by JPEG by most of two decades.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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