In a nutshell…

Panoman is a simple photo stitcher for the easiest panoramic pictures you’ll ever make. Don’t worry that you’ll never be able to print them, your mates will still be astounded by the three hundred and sixty degree brilliance of your snapping. Just don’t get too carried away.

Judgement time…

Making panoramic pictures is a tricky business. It’s possible with a conventional camera, but you’ll need special software, a tripod and an eye for detail.

See, to stitch together normal photos, you need to make sure they’re taken from the same elevation and the same vertical plane. Everything needs to be the same, except the direction the lens faces. Panoman changes that.

Its fancy software takes the stitching process out of your hands. Fire it up, spin on the spot and it’ll automatically figure out which edges to glue together and how your surroundings fit together. It’ll even work vertically, and you can go back over the same bit twice and it’ll (usually) figure out what’s going on.

The whole process is self contained too. There’s no reason to dive out of Panoman to send files via Bluetooth or MMS, and pre-set resolutions mean snapping a 360 view needn’t put a strain on your memory card.

The results are good, although when we tested it with a 2-meg camera at ‘high’ resolution, the resulting images weren’t particularly large when viewed on a computer.

Still, at just under 20 seconds, it’s the fastest panorama we’ve ever shot, not to mention the easiest.