On March 18th the United States Patent and Trademark Office granted a patent to Amazon’s technique of taking photos of products against a plain white background. Now this is going to change the industry of online e-commerce of almost all stores and online auction websites. Why is the government allowing these types of patents. Amazon Patent No.US 8,676,045 B1 – Here is the image of the patent:
The Amazon patent must include, a background comprising of a white cyclorama; a front light source positioned in a longitudinal axis intersecting the background, the longitudinal axis further being substantially perpendicular to a surface of the white cyclorama; an image capture position located between the background and the front light source in the longitudinal axis, the image capture position comprising at least one image capture device equipped with an eighty-five millimeter lens, at least one image capture device further configured with an ISO setting of about three hundred twenty and an f-stop value of about 5.6.
Amazon explains, that they are specifying a proprietary white-background photo image from others like it by pointing out that prior art often refers to image retouching, green screens or other forms of image manipulation. Amazon’s technique is apparently the purest of the pure, being only the photographer, the photographed object/person, the white background, a number of front lights/back lights and some sort of object separating the subject from the ground below it.