Canon Developing Touchscreen DSLR

Keep your eyes peeled for a DSLR camera with a touchscreen interface by Canon sometime in the near future. Photography Bay is reporting that Canon filed a patent in April 2009 containing images that seem to clearly depict a touchscreen interface.

Rather than describe functionality general to touchscreen interfaces, the 13 page patent describes a method for preventing accidental touches on the screen. After registering which eye you use for the viewfinder, the camera will detect when your eye is at the viewfinder, and will disable one side of the touchscreen to prevent the contact from your face from being registered as touches.

The patent also mentions that you can control aperture and shutter speed by sliding your finger vertically and horizontally, respectively. However, I’m not exactly sure how this is superior to current methods of adjusting these settings, since the physical dial seems to work just fine.

I couldn’t find the actual patent that Photography Bay cites (US Patent Application No. 12/422,695), but if anyone can post a link to the patent in the comments you’ll get kudos from us. We’ll update this post with a link. (Update: See link below)

What are your thoughts? Would you buy a touchscreen DSLR? Do you see any advantages or disadvantages?

Update: Eugene (@eugenephotoblog) spent two hours searching and finally found the patent. Mega kudos to Eugene!

You can check out the patent here.