Nokia Panorama appears for the N8

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We apologise for the never-ending stream of news items about the N8, but it's hard to shut up when exciting things appear day by day. In this case it's Nokia's home-grown Panorama application, first seen in the likes of the N86 8MP and N900, but now customised for the N8 and made available in the Ovi Store. See below for screens and a sample of its output.

The idea, as shown below, is to swivel on the spot with the application taking multiple photographs, in line horizontally, with the software stitching them all together to create a 'panorama':

Panorama app

Of note is that, unlike some previous implementations of this idea, you can choose how many snaps you take to make up each panorama. Pressing the shutter starts the process and pressing it again stops. The maximum seems to be nine photos. In addition, the overlap area between each seems to be higher than on other panorama apps I've tried, which should yield more reliable results.

Starting to capture

The final panorama image ends up at something like 6,000-10,000 by 670 pixels if you do it right, depending on how many snaps you opt to take and how well you keep the N8 vertically aligned. Here's one that did go right, click the panorama to enlarge or download:

Click to download original

The above was taken in early morning, overcast, poor light conditions, but just about came out acceptably. For a 12 megapixel sensor to be cranking out images with vertical resolution of only 700 pixels is at first glance surprising, but as the pixel count goes up, the amount of processing required to do the stitching gets prohibitively high (and thus would take too long, time-wise). The results are still fun and perhaps usable as web banners/images.

There are guides when rotating, but get it slightly wrong at each stage and more vertical resolution is lost in the final panorama. Two out of my three test shots were unusable because of this. Here's one that went wrong (I haven't linked to the full image - it's not worth it):

All wrong, vertically

I should note that I had the Panorama app freeze on me at one point - although fully functional, I'd emphasise that this is still a fledgling release for Symbian^3 and that updates will doubtless appear.

Nokia Panorama is free in the Ovi Store for the N8.

Steve Litchfield