Sony Patents a Wide-Angle Camera Lens That Fits Inside Thinner Devices
Wide-angle cameras that can see 90 degrees or more usually need a lot of physical depth to work well. Sony's new patent describes a lens system that pairs a curved image sensor with a carefully controlled optical formula to deliver that wide view in a much shorter package.
How Sony's curved-sensor lens squeezes wide shots into slim cameras
Every time you hold up a phone or a doorbell camera and try to capture a wide scene, the hardware inside is fighting a quiet battle: wide-angle optics tend to be tall and bulky, and shrinking them usually costs you image quality at the edges.
Sony's patent describes a solution built around a curved imaging surface. Instead of the flat sensor chips found in most cameras today, this design curves the sensor slightly, the way the back of your eye is curved. That curve lets the lens stay shorter while still bending light from a wide 90-degree-plus field of view onto the sensor cleanly.
To keep the image sharp across that whole wide view, Sony defines three specific mathematical relationships that any lens built this way must satisfy. Think of them as guardrails: they control how light from the center and edges of the scene hits the sensor, how compact the whole assembly is, and how the front lens element bends incoming light. Hit all three targets, and you get a low-profile camera that can still see a wide, high-quality picture.
An imaging lens, comprising a lens group including one or more lenses that form an optical image of an object on an imaging surface having a curved shape …
Translation: The camera lens uses a curved sensor surface to capture the picture.
The three mathematical rules Sony's lens design must satisfy
The patent covers a lens group, meaning one or more lens elements working together, that focuses an image onto a curved imaging surface rather than a flat one. The curve acts like a built-in corrector for the distortion that normally plagues wide-angle optics.
Three numerical conditions must all be met simultaneously:
- Light spread across the frame (Yw/Y)²: between 0.27 and 0.70. This ratio compares how far light rays hitting the sensor at a 40-degree half-angle land versus light rays at the full maximum half-angle. A low ratio means the lens compresses edge light more (fish-eye style); a high ratio means it spreads it more evenly. Sony's window captures a middle ground that keeps resolution balanced.
- Compactness ratio (TL/2Y): between 0.30 and 0.695. TL is the total physical length of the lens stack from front surface to imaging surface, and 2Y is the full diagonal of the image circle. Keeping this ratio below about 0.7 means the lens stays meaningfully shorter than the image it produces, the definition of a compact design.
- Front-element power (f/f1): between -0.35 and 0.73. This compares the focal length of the whole system to the focal length of the front lens alone (focal length being a measure of how strongly a lens bends light). The range allows the front element to be anywhere from mildly diverging (negative) to moderately converging (positive), giving designers flexibility in how they distribute optical work across the stack.
Together, these three conditions describe a design space rather than a single fixed lens, which is why the patent can cover many physical implementations.
… providing a high-quality image with a maximum angle of view of 90 degrees or more at a low height.
Translation: It captures a very wide view while staying thin enough for modern gadgets.
What a thinner wide-angle camera means for phones and small gadgets
For everyday devices, thinner cameras matter. Smartphones, security cameras, wearables, and car-facing sensors all face pressure to shrink their camera modules without sacrificing the wide field of view that makes them useful. A lens system that satisfies Sony's three conditions could, in principle, shave meaningful millimeters off camera module height while keeping edge sharpness intact.
Sony Semiconductor Solutions' steady investment in imaging optics shows up in filings like this one, which target the sensor-and-lens stack as a system rather than treating them separately. If the curved-sensor approach gains traction in manufacturing, the ripple effect could reach any small device where a camera currently creates an unwanted bump.
That makes this Sony's 42nd filing in our chip patent coverage since May, a series that includes one on self-steering laser light and one on cutting defects in depth sensors, all of which we've tracked here.
Claim 1 is written as a pure mathematical envelope: if your lens satisfies all three inequalities and uses a curved imaging surface with a 90-degree-plus angle of view, you fall inside this patent. That is a fairly broad claim because it covers any physical lens construction, any number of elements, and any material, as long as the ratios land in the defined windows.
In practice, the claim is narrowed by the combination of all three conditions together. A standard flat-sensor wide-angle lens fails on the curved-surface requirement alone. A curved-sensor lens that is too long fails the compactness ratio. So the overlap of all three boxes is genuinely specific to a family of compact, curved-sensor wide-angle designs.
For competitors building slim wide-angle modules with curved sensors, this filing would be worth watching closely. Anyone designing in that exact space would need to check whether their front-element power and image-height distribution land outside Sony's stated ranges. That is a real, if narrow, fence.
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The drawings
95 drawing sheets from US 2026/0267115 A1 · click any drawing to enlarge
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