PanoTools:
Kodak V570 for Panoramas?
Roger D. Williams 2006-May-22 04:06:13
Well, over the weekend I visited a huge camera store in Tokyo and
played with the Kodak V570, the one with 23mm fixed-focus lens
and 39-117mm (equiv) zoom. It is being very widely advertised,
and you see photos of it in most of the DPE shops. I wanted to
try its built-in panorama capabilities.
Must say it was a bit of a disappointment. I found I knew a lot
more about the camera from a one-page Asahi Camera review than
the young guy who tried to sell it to me...
The 23mm lens is fixed focus, which means problems with out-of-
focus foreground, and there seems to be little or no actual
blending of the images, just a (usually) well-chosen stitch
line. So you get doppelgangers, of course.
It seems that if you are very careful to keep the camera near
the so-called nodal point you can get good stitches... good
enough for enjoyment on screen, anyway, although marginal for
high quality prints. In-camera processing is fast, but you
don't get the chance to do it again yourself... the three
images are, it seems, subsumed into the panorama and are not
available for manual processing. That may not be true, but I
certainly could not find out how to do it, despite changing
the in-camera help to English.
But the main problems were tiny and badly identified controls
--including a row of little buttons along the top of the small,
unimpressive plasticky body--and a general feeling that this
was a clever toy not a real-world camera. The demonstration
camera also proved unreliable. We had to try three separate
battery packs before we could get one that worked--although
I suppose that could've been a battery-pack problem. My own
feeling was that there was some problem with the contacts in
the Kodak camera housing linking to the battery. That's what
it felt like.
So I think if I want three-shot horizontal panoramas, I'll
just take three with my 20mm lens on my manual SLR.
Roger
--
Work: www.adex-japan.com, Play: www.usefilm.com/member/roger
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