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US 7,623,181 B2Granted
Panhead
AssigneeCanon Kabushiki Kaisha
InventorShouichi Ibaraki
Life of this patent
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Abstract
A panhead which is capable of appropriately operating an image pickup device by a simple mechanism thereof. A fixed unit is set on a base of a camera-attached panhead. A pan rotation unit is supported on the pan fixed unit, for rotation within a plane parallel with the upper surface of the pan fixed unit. Two parallel-link mechanisms connect between a camera unit and the pan rotation unit and move the camera unit to a predetermined position in which a direction of an optical axis of the image pickup device is able to be maintained, depending on the use mode of the camera unit.
Claims7
A panhead comprising:
- a fixed unit;
- a rotation unit that rotates within a plane parallel with an upper surface of said fixed unit;
- and
- a moving mechanism that connects between an image pickup device and said rotation unit and moves the image pickup device relative to the rotation unit to a predetermined position in which a direction of an optical axis of the image pickup device is able to be maintained, depending on a use mode of the image pickup device;
- wherein in a normal use mode of the image pickup device, said moving mechanism moves the image pickup device in accordance with a shift of a center of gravity of the image pickup device to a position where the center of gravity of the image pickup device and a rotational axis of the image pickup device are aligned with each other.
2 more elements
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.