Patent attributes
An image pickup apparatus is able to shoot an image of a wide range by a plurality of image pickup units, it is able to obtain excellent image quality and it can be miniaturized. An image pickup apparatus 20 comprises a plurality of image pickup units 1 including an image pickup device 3 and a front lens 2, the adjacent image pickup units 1 being located in such a manner that image pickup areas overlap each other and the image pickup units being located so as to satisfy a conditional equation AL<fD (1) where a cross-section passing a viewpoint center, an image pickup device 3 and a front lens 2 is created in the direction in which the image areas of the adjacent image pickup portions overlap with each other, a cross-section length of the image pickup device 3 is assumed to be A, a cross-section length of the front lens 2 is assumed to be D, a length from the front lens 2 to the image pickup device 3 is assumed to be L and a focal length which results from synthesizing the whole of the lenses within the image pickup unit 1 containing the front lens 2 is assumed to be f and that the viewpoint center of each image pickup unit 1 may lie within a sphere with a diameter of 20 mm.
