A few weeks ago we were asked to participate in this neat little Sweep Panorama photo contest. Sony provided Neatorama with this sleek and very pretty Cyber-shot DSC-WX1 camera to play with. The task was to take a bunch of panoramic photos and submit them to compete against other photos by bloggers around the web. I'm not a professional photographer by any means, but I sure had fun anyway.
The camera is very little and a real treat to tote around. I am used to lugging around a huge SLR. As long as I am not having a particularly fat day, this compact Sony will actually fit in my pocket. But, the really nice thing about this Sony camera is that I don't feel like I am giving up quality for convienince. Yes, it's really really easy to use but has lots of bells and whistles to boot. The camera is 10.2 mega pixels, has a 5x optical lens, 24 mm wide-angle lens (35mm format), anti-motion blur, take movies and so on. Frankly this little guy is way smarter then I am.
The panoramic feature they asked us to test out is super cool. All you do is set the camera to the "sweep panorama" mode and you are ready to go. The camera shoots multiple images and seamlessly pieces the together into a panoramic image as you move the camera. You can take vertical or horizontal pictures. The fun thing about the mode is that you can fit a lot visually into one picture. The way it scans actually allows you to achieve a certain amount of depth that you can't get with other still cameras.
We are still playing with camera and we have been asked to submit even more photos. We can't tell you which ones we provided but we think you will have a good time looking at everyone's interpretation of the assignment. Check out the cool panoramic photos at WeSay and vote for your favorite panoramic photo today. The winner is allowed to choose which school they would like 10 additional cameras to be given so you are voting for a good cause.
http://www.wesay.com/sony/
Disclosure: We do get to keep the camera (Thanks Sony and Technorati! It rocks), but the opinion above was 100% ours. There was no pressure to write only positive reviews.
http://fabkawa.altervista.org/panoramiche.html
thanks to all of you
"The way it scans actually allows you to achieve a certain amount of depth that you can't get with other still cameras." => what does this mean? do you have example fotos? what other cameras/software did you compare it to?
The objectiveness of this piece is zero and reeks of "promotion through blogosphere".
I believe an article like this is worth far more than one camera, check with advertisers how much you could earn from a one page add an set a decent price to advertisers.
IMHO, sony is a crappy do-everything-mediocre company. I'll get my camera from a camera maker, my tv from a tv maker and my kitchen household from ... you can guess it...
Here's a quick example: http://img33.imageshack.us/img33/8241/hudsonpanoramic21.jpg made from 4 overlapping shots of the Hudson River.
www.skipweasel.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/clee/panorama.jpg
OK - you can see the joins but that's more to do with the variable quality of the input.