The Apple Pencil was already the best iPad Pro accessory for budding digital artists, but a new patent suggests it could be much more useful in the not-too-distant future.
Rather than having to choose your colors manually on the screen, the patent imagines an Apple Pencil with built-in photodetectors. That means you could point your new Apple Pencil at something in the real world, a paint shade, for example, or a flower. and instantly have the color available to draw on the screen.
“The color sensor may have a plurality of photodetectors, each of which measures light for a respective different color channel,” says the patent. “The color sensor can also have one or more light emitting devices. Control circuits can use light emitting devices to illuminate an external object while using photodetectors to measure reflected light to determine the color of the external object. ”
While the patent is brand new, filed in November 2019 and only released on Thursday, maybe we shouldn’t get too excited because a new Apple Pencil is just around the corner. Apple files a large number of patents, over 2,500 in the past year, and not all of them see the light of day. In fact, it’s worth reflecting on the fact that Apple filed a similar patent six years ago, and we haven’t yet seen the technology used in any obvious way.
Still, the utility of being able to extract colors from the real world is pretty obvious, and it would be nice to see Apple Pencil get an update. There are currently two generations, with the new model being firmly “evolution” instead of “revolution”. Added wireless charging, a flat edge to keep it from slipping and some simple gesture commands. Both remain on sale, because each Pencil is compatible with a different set of iPads.
Other innovations on the way for the iPad Pro include a Mini-LED display, which is supposed to offer all the benefits of OLED without the threat of burning. You would get the same great contrast ratio and truer black tones as well as higher brightness. Mini-LEDs accomplish this by using smaller LEDs (light-emitting diodes), as the name implies, to power the backlights on displays.
At the end of June, the iPad Pro with LED Mini screen was in trial production, which means it would be released later this year at the earliest. But it is not known if this advance of the Apple Pencil will be ready in time.
