Someone on the Loop article said:

459 – take image contained within lens and store in some type of memory.

219 – display the picture that will be taken in some type of display window.

010 – one of the first ones, push button in order to capture image.

899 – make images contained within some type of memory and make them viewable in some sort of digital camera roll.

They all sound so general that everyone making digital cameras will have to shell out bucks to St. Clair, if the company can continue to enforce those patents.

459

219

Those two cover this:

“An electronic still camera comprising a lens, shutter, and exposure control system, a focus and range control circuit, a solid state imaging device incorporating a Charge Coupled Device (CCD) through which an image is focused, a digital control unit through which timing and control of an image for electronic processing is accomplished, an Analog-to-Digital (A/D) converter circuit to convert the analog picture signals into their digital equivalents, a pixel buffer for collecting a complete row of an image’s digital equivalent, a frame buffer for collecting all rows of an image’s digital equivalent, and a selectively adjustable digital image compression and decompression algorithm that compresses the size of a digital image and selectively formats the compressed digital image to a compatible format for either the IBM Personal Computer and related architectures or the Apple Macintosh PC architecture as selected by the operator so that the digital image can be directly read into most word processing, desktop publishing, and data base software packages including means for executing the appropriate selected decompression algorithm; and a memory input/output interface that provides both temporary storage of the digital image and controls the transmission and interface with a standard Personal Computer (PC) memory storage device such as a digital diskette. The digital diskette is removably inserted into the housing of the camera prior to use in recording digital image data.”

010: “A digital camera includes a digital memory system having a control unit for checking for proper format initialization of a removable digital memory element and for performing format initialization of the memory element when necessary”

899: A process for use in an electronic camera generates a digital image signal corresponding to an image incident on an image pick-up unit of the camera, formats the digital image signal in one of a plurality of computer image file formats and stores the formatted image file in a storage device of the camera.

So, yeah, he was being facetious, but that’s basically what they cover. Defenders of St. Clair are pointing out that this was all new technology when it was patented. But if that’s the case, why did it take so long to file all these lawsuits?

PS: I linked to the patent office filings in the above posts.