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| Quote: Meet the Ricoh Theta, a small, light camera with two wide-angle lenses capable of stitching together two shots into a full 360° panorama with just a push of a button. The downside? It'll set you back some $399 when it arrives in October. | |
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http://www.imaging-resource.com/news/20 ... opping-400
$399 isn’t much when you consider the cost of taking panoramas properly. You’ll need some kind of rig to rotate your camera around the lenses’ nodal point (alone, those can cost $200 upwards), a really wide angle lens. If you can get a decent fisheye, this will give you almost 180 degrees of view, and on top of that stitching software as generally you’ll need to shoot at least 4 images for a decent sphere (basically, each of the compass points, plus up and down). Right now, I have the rig and a standard wide angle lens - so I need to shoot around 16 images for a full sphere. Add to that the time it takes to stitch, use Photoshop to remove duplicates of moving objects and other annoyances, and you have a really lengthy process.
Note I said “properly” above. Using the sweep method or the many iPhone apps that use the gyroscope to read the tilt of the phone gives you reasonable results, but you will see stitch errors and problems caused by parallax. If you want a really good stitch you need to be very precise about how you rotate the camera - which is where brackets and expensive kit come in.
So a handy point and shoot unit like this does come over as being rather interesting. Two simultaneous shots to take the image - I wonder how the extreme edges of the lenses (where things can be squashed quite badly) fare. I’d love to see this in action.
