Summary: this is an old page. It shows the Olympus panorama facility at its worst,
but also doesn't show my own panoramas very well. But I don't have the hardware necessary
to update it, and I don't intend to get it again, for reasons that will become clear in the
text.
My Olympus E-510 camera had a rather interesting feature, support for panorama photos. For reasons best
known to Olympus, it only works with
an xD memory card. Andrzej Wrotniak has
already pointed out the
stupidity of this approach, and since I had only a CF card, I couldn't use the feature.
Instead, I did a series of weekly panoramas of the outside of my house using hugin.
Then I bought an additional memory card. It made sense to buy an xD card, since that way I
could have both cards in the camera at the same time and didn't need so large a card. So on
28 February 2009 I tried it out. It was a pain the whole way:
To use it, I need to set “SCENE” mode, and it insists on “Live
View”, presumably so that it can display a frame for lining up the photos. But
Live View is quite a problem outside in the sun, where it can often be too bright to use
it.
The overlap required appears to be fixed, and is very small, only about 10% of the total
picture width. As a result I only took 4 photos for the test shot, where hugin
had shown me I needed 7, and even so I had a wider range. Based on my prior experience,
I had my doubts about whether it would be enough.
Once having taken the photos, I had to process them with this horrible OLYMPUS Master
2, which took several attempts just to download the images from the
camera—and then I couldn't find the way to get it to load only some of them, so it
took about 20 minutes to load the entire contents of the card. About the only
reasonably clever thing it did was to select the images automatically when I clicked on
“Panorama”—but I still needed to double-click on each one to get it to
accept it.
Finally it created a panorama of sorts. As I had feared, the overlap wasn't enough, and the
exposure was uneven. According to the instructions, the focus and exposure remain unchanged
for the set of photos, but it doesn't look like it. Here the “normal” panorama
created by hugin, followed by the Olympus panorama, both uncropped. Normally you'd
crop the edges.
The joins between the individual photos are very clear, while with hugin I have to look
carefully to see them. Here are three details of the preceding photos:
Here the hugin image (the first) shows an offset column, but that's all. The Olympus
photo shows duplication of one of the Canna
flowers and severe discontinuities in the roof structure.
I can't see anything wrong with the hugin image here, but the Olympus image shows two
problems: firstly the obvious discontinuities, and secondly the missing detail at bottom
centre, caused by lack of enough images.
Here there's a minor discontinuity in the hugin image,
and—surprisingly—none in the Olympus image. But the exposure is completely
different; possibly the light changed between the two images, and it couldn't handle it.
The images made with hugin aren't perfect—they were done with default settings.
They can be greatly improved with a bit more work. Here an example where I've gone to the
trouble:
Apart from the duplicate cat—something that no panorama software can avoid—it's
almost impossible to see any discontinuity. I haven't found any way to improve on the
panorama with Olympus MASTER 2.
In sum, then, another “feature” that I can forget about. I can't see any
advantage in it.
