Patent 7848625 was granted and assigned to Kowa Company, Ltd. on December, 2010 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
An imaging system is provided that is capable of controlling a photographic operation to provide favorable images of a fundus of an eye to be examined. When a normal photographic mode is selected, a single operation of a shutter button causes a single trigger signal to be generated. On the other hand, when a stereo photographic mode is selected, a single operation of a shutter button causes two trigger signals to be generated in succession. The generated trigger signal triggers a switching device so that a position of a photographic stop is automatically switched to a position predetermined for the photographic mode, and the photographic light source is caused to emit light a number of times that corresponds to the selected photographic mode. In such a configuration, fundus images are automatically produced a set number of times by a single operation of the shutter. Therefore, a high-quality fundus image can be obtained without concerns that an appropriate moment to capture an image will be missed.