Taking panoramic photos

I was surfing on line and started looking at the Hasselbald Xpan2 camera. Thought that it would be cool to have one. I'm wondering if there is a need for a camera like that today when we have digital files and photo-stitch? I use a canon Mk3ds.

Well, you could argue that any time you can get an image in one rip, at one time, you're ahead of the game...

However, there have been some amazingly seamless panos posted lately that would seem to suggest that multiple frames + stitching software = fine results.

That is what I was thinking. With 21 mega pixels you really could print a large picture.

kevhead wrote in post #6277767
That is what I was thinking. With 21 mega pixels you really could print a large picture.

At 21Mp you could crop one frame into a pretty good sized pano and skip the stitching all together!

The XPan has a format that is 2:6 or 1:3 which is approximately equal to a 6x17 in medium format. I had a dedicated 6x17 camera and I can tell you that finding a subject that lays well across the entire frame is difficult and in fact I often had to crop to generate the image I wanted. I have a 4x10 view camera and the XPan has been tempting for years.

I just purchased a Zeiss/Contax PC 35 lens for the sake of generating a panoramic at full resolution on a 5DII. I did a quick test at Trader Joes and produced this image from PhotoMerge in CS4. The conversion was the easy part. My question is whether the perspective is correct and whether a shift only solution works. I get the sense that the lens may have not been perpendicular to the subject (something I have been trying to find the means to correct). Here is the image. What do you think? The image size at full resolution is 7704 pixels across and this is conservative using half the shift in either direction.

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