Patent ID: 7821529

Claim:
An endoscope imaging system comprising: an endoscope for photoelectrically converting an optical image of a subject and outputting an image-captured signal; and an image processing unit, to which the endoscope is detachably connected, for processing the image-captured signal from the endoscope, wherein the endoscope comprises: an image pickup element comprising one image-capture surface constructed with a plurality of scanning lines and driven by a pickup drive signal, wherein each of the plurality of scanning lines comprise a first number of pixels; a drive circuit for generating and outputting the pickup drive signal to the image pickup element, the pickup drive signal having a first frequency based on the first number of pixels for sequentially reading an image signal captured on the image-capture surface of the image pickup element for every scanning line; and a frequency dividing circuit for dividing a clock signal, having a preset frequency and being supplied by the image processing unit, to generate: a driving clock signal having the first frequency to be used by the drive circuit to generate and output the pickup drive signal, a writing signal having the first frequency for writing the image-captured signal read from the image pickup element to a line memory, and a reading signal having a second frequency higher than the first frequency for reading the image-captured signal from the line memory; and wherein the image processing unit comprises: the line memory having a memory capacity capable of storing one scanning line of image-captured signals read from the image pickup element; an oscillator for generating the clock signal having the preset frequency; and a video signal processing circuit for performing video signal processing on the image-captured signals stored in the line memory and read from the line memory with a reading signal at the second frequency.