I recently drafted up this quick little email to some co-workers looking at capabilities of the Panoramic Sweep feature on the Sony WX1.  I bought this little point and shoot to take with me on my trip to South Africa for the World Cup.

Here’s what I learned taking pictures with the PanoSweep feature on the WX1 (a.k.a. the Taylor Swift camera).

It took some practice but after I got the hang of the sweeping motion the shots came out pretty well.  I thought this Korean flag was pretty awesome:

What I did notice was that I had to get used to and adjust for the metering when using the PanoSweep.  Early on I ended up with a lot of shots that were blown out:

With some practice I learned to compensate by focusing on the sun first to set the metering, and then taking the sweep:

For comparison I also took multiple “normal” shots with the WX1 using the standard auto shooting mode.  The top photo of each is the WX1 PanoSweep version and the bottom version is a stitch composed from 4 shots using Windows Live Photo Gallery.  [Disclosure:  I work on the Windows Live Photo Gallery team at Microsoft.]

WX1 PanoSweep:

Photo Gallery stitch from 4 shots:

WX1 PanoSweep:

Photo Gallery stitch from 4 shots:

Overall the Photo Gallery panoramic stitch clearly wins out on quality. This makes sense because it’s composed from four higher quality (~10MP) images (The WX1 down samples the image to 5.1 MP when shooting in PanoSweep mode).  That said the WX1 is far more convenient, and I remember to change the dial on my point and shoot more often than I think “let me take 5 images to stitch later.”   Having the result of the panoramic available immediately on the camera LCD is also encouraging because you just end up trying the shot a few times until it looks good.

The one question I got about the PanoSweep images was if they are cropped automatically.  The answer to that is both yes and no.  The image from the WX1 comes out cropped automatically, but that’s because if you veer too far from center vertically while capturing the panorama, the camera will spit out a message saying something to the effect of “Please move the camera steadily horizontally.”  I’m assuming the WX1 is actually capturing somewhat above and below what I see as the final shot, and only spits out the middle vertical section of what is captured as the “final image.”

You can also change the PanoSweep setting to expect the camera to sweep upward or downward.   Again, I assume the WX1 just has an accelerometer in the camera that keeps track of how close your sweeping motion is to center.  Also, if you’re hoping the WX1 will let you shoot an infinite panorama, you can’t capture indefinitely.  The camera senses a certain range of motion and once you’ve completed that range it spits out the panorama.  This probably helps keep the WX1 panoramic stitching within the processing capability of the camera.