Quote Originally Posted by goamules View Post
I guess if I was going to build a lens, I would call him and ask him if it was breaking his patent. But I'm not. The patent reads very confusing, but looking at the copious diagrams, it seems it is a defined design, with lots of elements. My mistake was reading the preamble, before looking at the actual diagrams. It was confusing me that he was mentioning a ton of old, tried and true designs.

I think what his design is doing is addressing the need for a sharp, flat, fast lens. "...virtually all high-speed photographic lenses designed to date are compromised by the need to balance large aberrations against each other. Most often these designs are notably soft in the outer sub-group of the image field, and must be stopped far down to achieve good performance. "
The easiest way to see what is protected, or covered, by a patent is to look at the claims, specifically the independent claims (1 and 10 in this case) the other, dependent, claims are just refinements of these two. The independent claims specifically describe the parameters of the invention, in this case, specific design parameters and properties of lenses, which look to be narrowly enough described to be distinguished from what has been done before. As Garrett surmised, the problem solved by this invention (which is actually a continuation of prior inventions), is a design for high speed lenses with sharpness across the field within specified focal lengths.

I'm not a patent lawyer, but my work forces me to spend a considerable amount of my time working with them, as well as examiners at the US PTO

Cheers

Tim