Digital Panorama 2010

Cameras: Panoramic Photography becomes mainstream, or at least the technology. More cameras are on the market creating panoramic views on the fly. Sony offers the Panorama Sweep mode, that allows literally sweeping over a scene and the camera creates a panoramic view on the spot. The quality is amazing but still cannot compete with "traditionally" stitched images and the camera still stitches discrete images and does not resemble a vertical line scanner. I wont buy one, but stick to my old Kodak V705 for on-the-spot panorama experiments.

(Picture by SHAFT9 on flickr)
See this sample panorama (link) or just serach for "sony nex 5 panorama" on flickr (it shows quite obvious stitching errors.

The result: you see panoramic images more often now, but similar to the flood of images when digital photography conquered the world in shape of mobile phones, it is hard to find outstanding panoramas.

Software: Panorama Stitching software keeps on evolving and we have CPU power and software (PTGui, Autopano,..) that creates panoramic images in much shorter time, even of not so perfect raw images. I re-visit old projects that failed some 2..3 years back in automode of Autopano and now get decent results ! On the expert-end more super-highres panoramas are released. Look at the 26 GigaPixel image of Paris, made of 2346 individual images (Dont think you can shoot that handheld!)

Panorama on the fly

The panorama feature is nothing new, lots of consumer camera have at least a panorama assistant or even a in-camera stitch feature, producing more or less good panoramas on the spot, most of the time at a rather low resolution due to the limited camera memory and processing power).
I didnt notice a complete new approach to this by Sony earlier this year (March 09). They released the DSC-HX1, the first camera with a panorama sweep mode, which means basically it creates a panoramic image while panning across a scene. Judge yourself with the review at dpreview.com which comes with details and sample panoramas. As usual I am tempted to play with it, but the price tag is too high for another gadget.