Patent 7492409 was granted and assigned to Sony on February, 2009 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
An imaging apparatus is comprised of a light controller including a liquid crystal element and a polarizing plate located in front of an optical low-pass filter in the optical path of the imaging apparatus. The polarization direction of the polarizing plate and the orientation for the liquid crystal element are selectively chosen with respect to the rotation of the optical low pass filter elements in order to achieve a desired improvement in the device performance.