I’m more than mildly tempted by the CENTR camera, a Kickstarter project I read about on PetaPixel that gives you a tiny doughnut of a camera you can handhold (with your thumb up the hole in the middle, and a ring of LEDs on the bottom so you can keep it level if you want. Using 4 cameras and stitching their images results in a 360 degree video with a circumference of 6900 pixels and a height of 1080 pixels, which you can also view (and print) as a long thin image. Each of the identical f2.0 lenses produces a horizontal view of 110 degrees and a vertical 75 degrees. More details
It looks an incredible piece of gear, and should be shipping in Feb 2015 to Kickstarters who pledge $299 or more (+ $55 for shipping outside the US) which makes it around £210 in the UK. It is expected to go on the market – if it reaches the Kickstarter target – for $399.
A few things only make me reluctant to put my money up. Remarkable though it is, it is still quite a lot of money for something which I see essentially as a toy. Though the sample video is impressive, the still image quality is rather less so. There is a link on the page to some “high resolution still images“, which are around 5000 x 720 pixels (the camera works in either 720 or 1080 pixel high modes.) On screen, some of these are quite impressive at 33% size, though with a lot of blue fringing, which could probably be greatly reduced with suitable software. But at full size – as with viewing the movies full screen – they are noticeably soft and lacking in detail. I’ve not tried printing any of these (and you can see some prints in the Kickstarter video) but I don’t think I would be very happy with anything larger than a long strip about two and a half inches high.
Last week I saw a 360 degree panorama by a friend of mine, Mike Seaborne, taken on the Swanscombe peninsula (where I’ll soon be getting on my 1985 walks in North Kent I’m occasionally posting here), taken with a Nikon D800E, part of a show ‘The Swanscombe Project’ by 16 photographers at Goldsmiths, University of London which ends on 4 May. I can remember quite how long it was, but very long, printed on canvas that Mike says was too long to completely unroll inside his living room. Perhaps around 12 feet, and you could walk along beside it, looking as close as you like and seeing detail. A completely different experience. The pictures from the show aren’t on his web site but you can see some of his other pictures of the area on the page linked above.
But that’s not to knock the Centr, just to point out the kind of thing it isn’t suitable for. I think 360 panoramas are actually best suited for viewing interactively on screen and although I’ve made some in the past I’ve never printed them as such. The added experience of the movie is I think great for them, though I find the interface a little uncontrollable. Probably the only thing that makes me hesitate about supporting the Kickstarter project is that you need to have a smartphone to work with the camera, and my current mobile is anything but smart, a museum piece of technology that has enabled me to make and receive calls since around 2001, and I now see described on e-Bay as “Vintage Retro Collectible“. It’s probably time I got a new phone, but the ancient Sony works and costs me very little to run on pay as you go.