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01/11/2007 09:15:13 AM · #1 |
I was listening toThe World on NPR yesterday, and they were talking about a new piece of hardware called the Gigapan. It sounds like you place it on top of your tripod and under your camera. It allows you to capture multiple images that can be later stitched into a panorama. I guess the point is that it moves the camera very precisely so as to have a very seamless, final image.
It will be out in March for about $100.
Here's the link. It was developed by a university and NASA:
GIGAPAN
And here's the link to the story I heard on The World
GIGAPAN STORY AUDIO |
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01/13/2007 10:31:17 AM · #2 |
| Anyone planning on getting this? |
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01/14/2007 03:39:46 AM · #3 |
I looked at making something along these lines a couple of years ago, but never got there... Interseting that someone has created one commercially though.
The concept was discussed in a landscape photography book I got out of a library, as one way to use low res digital cameras to create expansive landscapes. (It was written in 1998 from memory, and cameras weren't up to much yet)
This might have got me interested in re-viving the idea...
It's very simple thing to do, the only bit I'm missing is a couple of decent gearboxes, which I could probably drum up from somewhere..
The only thing I'm not sure about, is what I'd do with a massive image if I had one. The last large panorama I did was from 9 shots from the 20D, and resulted in just under a 50Mp image with the overlaps etc..
It's on the lounge wall across from me, printed out 2.5m wide. It is flawless in terms of resolution/detail, and I don't know how being higher in resolution would have helped it at all.
The only real use for a gigapixel image is showing off pixel peeping to other geeks, or printing a billboard you can inspect with a magnifying glass, which we all know dosn't happen.
While it's great for people to do this type of reasearch, and there are some real applications in environment monitoring, but it seems of little practical use for 'normal people' when I can do a huge panorama print using an old fashioned panorama head on my tripod.
Cheers, Chris H.
Cheers, Chris H. |
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01/14/2007 05:07:19 AM · #4 |
some of the programs out now do a very good job of matching the images up also
I used one which even got the fence line and power line correct when aligning the shots |
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01/16/2007 04:10:05 AM · #5 |
Hi-ho,
For the stitching end of the process I use Hugin, which is a front-end for Panorama tools... (Using it on Linux, but it's available for windows/OSx as well)
It will handle huge images, although I dunno about Giga-pixel scale images. The largest I've done was 200mp output image.. (600Mb tiff).
If you've got a good enough image set it will always produce a near perfect stitch. It also does the exposure blending, and lens distortion correction automatically after giving it some info about focal length etc.
The next thing I want to try with panoramas is going to be creating a HDR panorama, by creating a set of identical panorama's shot in raw over a large dynamic range, merging them in hugin, then tone mapping them in photomatix, or something like that.
Cheers, Me. |
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07/27/2007 05:23:12 PM · #6 |
| I just saw an update on this Gigapan project. It looks like the date slipped from March and will be available soon. See the article in Photo Techniques Magazine which references the project site at Gigapan. There are some nice panoramas there that you can zoom in an amazing amount! |
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