Reversi

The general trend is to go from film to digital. Less hassle, you can do it all yourself as long as you have a computer and a decent piece of editing software.

If you're interested in high resolution panography however, the story is a little bit different. I'm about to delve into film for the first time (yes, my first film camera), an Horizon 202 panoramic swing lens camera. It has a 120° horizontal and 45° vertical field of view, and while it shoots to 35mm, it in fact exposes to a 58 x 24mm rectangle.

Currently, in order to achieve a 50 megapixel panorama, I need to take approximately 12 overlapping exposures on my Canon 400D, swivelling the camera bit by bit on the panoramic head. Prior to this I need to measure the correct nodal point of the camera / lens / focal length combination so that I don't produce parallax in the overlapping shots. Time consuming, and because it is time consuming, the overall scene is going to be that much different with each constituent exposure due to movement. Then, once the shooting is done, it's back to the computer and stitching software, praying that I can make a decent panorama out of the constituent images.

With a 4800dpi film scanner and the Horizon, I will be able to reduce 12 or more exposures to one exposure. Something of a time saver. The real comedic part is, if I up that scan res to 7200dpi, I will get a 120 megapixel image. The nearest equivalent in the digital world is the 160 megapixel Seitz 6x17 Digital coming in at about 30,000 euros. I'm buying the Horizon for $AUD470.

Hopefully the quality of those 50 megapixels will match or exceed what I can attain with my current digital setup. Obviously the flickr and ipernity crowd will be the first to know ;)