David Brown , Sep 06, 2010; 07:55 a.m.
Hi guys and girls, I have not posted here for over 2 years now but thought I might give it another go and see how
things progress here.
<
p>My wife and kids just gave me the new Cybershot P&S that can also do panoramic shots which has just r
ecently been released here in Aus, no doubt you guys in the northern hemisphere have had more exposure to it to d
ate.
<
p>I still have my EOS and love film but to be honest I have not dusted it off for a while now, too darn busy! So I gav
e it a whirl on fathers day and it seems to take some good quality shots and I was amazed to see that it has 14M
P and had a lot of options for manual exposure settings and some settings I am not sure about and the manual doe
s not cover properly.
I tried the pano setting without reading too much on it and it looked pretty good but obviously not as good as a ded
icated pano camera. The lcd screen is a good size and much easier to see in sunlight than my daughters older Can
on DSLR so all in all I may have been bitten by the shutter bug again.
Any advise on how best to use it would be appreciated or any things I should take note of feel free to jump in and let
me know.
Thanks
Dave���
JC Uknz 
, Sep 06, 2010; 11:24 a.m.
I wouldn't be too dismissive of the camera since the 'dedicated panoramic camera' gives you a set angle of view with your camera you can vary to suit the subject from just a two frame image through to perhaps eighteen for a 380degree pan all around you :-)
Unless I want a quick, relatively, job I stitch my panos in Paint Shop Pro so that I can have control over which part of reality I want to use in the overlapping portions of the sequence, such as when there is movement in frame between adjacent frames. I usually reduce each file to half or quarter size otherwise the total file size of half a dozen shots gets a bit big for PSP and my computer to handle.
If you need to point the camera up or down for the pano then increase the amount of overlap so that you can apply perpective correction to each frame before you do the stitch.
Don't get too hung up about tripods or circling the nodal point of the lens .... I've taken panos while moving the camera a mile or so between frames for a backdrop photo, and talking about the process to an audience I got the end guy on each of about four rows to take a shot of the audience and then stitched them ... it was a hell of an editing job but we made it :-)
These comments don't apply to the really complicated vertical and horizontal creations but to the average shot where the lens isn't wide enough to get it all in.
Finally it is better to take more frames with a longer focal length than to use the widest angle of your zoom and fewer frames ... the wider the lens angle the more distortion and more difficult to stitch. Upwards of 35mm equivalent angle of view lens is a good starting point.
David Brown , Sep 07, 2010; 12:46 a.m.
Thanks for the info. However I don't need to stitch them as the camera does a full 180 pano shot all by itself. You just hold the shutter button down and pan 180 and it captures the full image and there you have it!
Bill Tuthill 
, Sep 07, 2010; 11:38 a.m.
David, you might get better feedback from actual Cybershot owners on the dpreview.com Sony P&S forum. I considered the HX5V for its GPS feature, but image quality is worse than the F200EXR I already had.
David Brown , Sep 08, 2010; 05:30 a.m.
JC Uknz , Sep 09, 2010; 11:44 a.m.
Yes Dave it is obviously Panos for dummies ;-) As opposed to a creative tool that I learnt to do pano's with a decade ago with my Canon s20.
