Sunday, January 23, 2011

Sweeping Panoramic Sample

Sony started this sweeping panoramic feature in their point & shoots, and later implemented this in their large sensor cameras, such as the NEX-5.  At first, I thought this was a gimmick, with little practical use, but after trying it, the sweeping panoramic feature is quite useful, but there is one drawback -- image quality.

Let me say that this could be just me, since I have only used this feature a few times, but all of the panoramic pictures I have shot have very blurry quality to it.  Personally, I think it's due to Sony's sub par jpeg engine.  Never did like the jpeg pictures that come out of a Sony camera.  Another reason might be that processing and stitching so many frames into one panoramic picture takes a lot of CPU cycle in the camera; higher quality jpeg compression might be too much for the camera's internal computer to handle.

In any case, it's better than nothing and when you reduce the size, it does look quite all right.  To get maximum quality, one still need to shoot RAW and stitch them together using dedicated software.

Life Guard Station in Kew Beach -- NEX-5 & Pentax-M 20mm f4. Click to see larger.
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6 comments:

  1. obakesanJanuary 23, 2011 at 3:47 PM

    interesting .. or could be motion blur artifacts?

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  2. Lens BubbleJanuary 23, 2011 at 4:58 PM

    okbakesan, it's possible, because in order to create the sweeping panoramic, one has to pan the camera. But, the shutter speed was like 1/500s.

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  3. obakesanJanuary 23, 2011 at 11:09 PM

    hmmm ... focal plane shutter? Does it take multi images as it goes or attempt to do something snazzy like a Horizon?

    http://www.wrotniak.net/photo/tech/fp-shutter.html

    http://www.wrotniak.net/photo/tech/_img/lartigue.jpg

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  4. Lens BubbleJanuary 23, 2011 at 11:17 PM

    It takes a total of 7 or 8 frames (could be more, can't remember) as you sweep or move the camera horizontally (hence the sweeping panoramic name), and the camera stitches them together on the fly. It's kind of amazing as it keeps the horizon very straight even though I know I didn't keep the camera horizontally straight. Works well for static objects, but not very good for things that move. Will try it more and update when I get a chance.

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  5. Chester ChenJanuary 27, 2011 at 10:49 AM

    For a bit more resolution try Panoramic Sweep in Portrait orientation. You get a lot more pixel height. Ends up catching almost the same amount of sweep but doesn't look odd when resized for the web which really reduces the vertical height and ends up with no detail.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Lens BubbleJanuary 27, 2011 at 10:03 PM

    @Chester: Thanks for the great tip. Will definitely try that next time.

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