Category: Photography
Price: $2.99
Everyone loves panoramic photography. It's a gimmick, sure, but the novelty doesn't wear off like those black and white photos with just a single subject in color (GAG!), or those lomography-style collages of 4-8 sequential shots of your child's first steps (BORINGGGG!) – a beautiful panorama, say a sweeping 180º vista of the Grand Canyon in all its summer splendor, simply catches your attention and doesn't let go. Like Kim Kardashian's derriere, only not as wide.
So an app like Panorama Camera, by a company renowned for producing the panoramic photo software that comes bundled with most digital cameras, should be pretty awesome for the job, right? Of course not. Everybody installs that crap because it comes on the Drivers CD, but nobody ever uses it. The only reason why camera companies include that crap is because it costs very little, and gives them an extra bullet point to put on the side of the box, like "Panoramic stitching software inside!" Going by the shoddy quality of ArcSoft's first iPhone app, that's like putting a "Live Girls!" neon sign on the side of a women's hospital – barely true.
It's primary feature is a mode akin to Sony's "Sweep Panorama" technology, where you simply move your camera from side-to-side without pressing any buttons, and the camera records and stitches everything together automatically. The difference is that Sony has half an idea how to do this. Panorama Camera can't handle variations in exposure within a scene (almost any scene will have dark/light areas), and it constantly duplicates objects even when they have sharp pointy edges. Even if you do manage to get a good stitch, the photo is saved at a pathetic resolution close to the iPhone's native screen size.
In short, I wouldn't trust Panorama Camera to stitch two white pixels together, let alone a scene made up of five photos. ArcSoft Panorama Camera is a blind man throwing daggers at a woman on a rotating board. It's a blind man driving a bulldozer in an orphanage for landmine victims. It's a blind man bowling down an alleyway filled with Ming vases. Don't ask what the Ming vases are doing in an alley! It's called a menopause, you reiterate!
"When Compared to AutoStitch" Rating: 0 / 5
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Please don't buy Panorama Camera in the iTunes App Store.
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These official screenshots are lies! The actual interface doesn't even contain these elements!
Update: Here are some pathetic photos I took indoors. Their full sizes are 272px tall at most.
2 comments:
YOU LIE. Those stitches are beautiful. Like drunk hobos, shouting at you, you know. That kind of beauty.
They describe an effect not unlike being drunk, I agree.
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