A bit of a backgrounder on my Panono camera review and why I would be writing about this camera in the first place. Aside from being a part107 commercial drone pilot, I have been shooting panoramas and spherical panoramas since the nineties, for commercial entries like car companies and hotel chains. back in the "old days" this involved shooting a series of images around in multiple layers which we then stitched painstakingly into a sphere, specialized tools, lots of experience, skill and patience was involved in getting a perfect result. You know where Im going with this right?
As you probably already know, there are a fair amount of 1-click spherical cameras on the market already, I own a ThetaV 4k 1-click camera that produce a shockingly good result. however its still fairly low-res and "soft" by photography standards. For commercial tours I still like to shoot a DSLR in a 120deg indexed rotator with a fisheye lens. But the DSLR+fisheye+stitching situation is still fairly labor intensive.
This is where the Panono comes in, its essentially a multi-level pano rig turned instant 1-click camera experience.
The most striking part of the Panono camera is the 36 lenses, which essentially speaking is 12 smartphone cameras distributed on each of 3 "orange slices" that make up the camera.
Read on for a bit of history and perspective on the Panono 1.0 spherical camera.
Spoiler.. its an acquired taste, but in the end, I really like my Panono camera.
History
The brainchild of German inventor Jonas Pfeil, The Panono camera started life as a crowd funded camera in the fall of 2013, being funded to the tune of $1,250,000 by 2600 backers. Unfortunately Jonas in his optimism under estimated the challenges of bringing the camera from the working concept to a mass market product. and even with so many backers, that meant he had to first develop the hardware, then the software and finally the online server system. The challenges in terms of stitching was enormous because the off-set camera system is basically born with a big nodal-point error, which Jonas had great ideas for solving. The Panono company did successfully bring the camera to market in 2017, but when you do the math, with the 2600+ backers, they had less than $500 per camera to both design and manufacture the camera, in the end that was just not enough capital, and unfortunately Jonas' company became insolvent after delivering about 500 cameras in the summer of 2017.
Jonas, Im sorry it did not work out as scheduled, you designed a great camera and you truly deserved to succeed, it was just not in the cards.
You can find the original Panono Indigogo campaign online.
This brings us to today, the Panono camera and online server system is now owned by Professional360 GMBH (german for incorporated) and it is now shipping in various packages, the least expensive of which I have seen being about $1400+
The Camera
Well as mentioned before, the camera is a ball of 36 cameras. The 36 cameras is the genius of the camera, because its the only high-resolution spherical camera that can capture spherical panoramas of things like a marathon where every object is moving, runners, audience, dogs and little kids, everybody is moving and only a 1-click camera can grab a instant picture. traditional multi-shot pano solutions are almost impossible in moving events. You could say the Panono existence is fully justified as a news-camera just because it can capture protest-marches and sports events like no other spherical camera can.
The achilles heel or heels.
One way or another the 36 cameras are also the achilles heel of the Panono camera.
First a camera with native nodal-point error simply put it is impossible to mount 36 cameras directly in the same nodal point. as a result the camera struggle to render files with very near and far objects. it works best when everything is 1m/3feet or more removed from the camera. and if everything is say 5m range, except for a item at 1m, that item will struggle to render because it's offset compared to the stitching of the background.. soo wide spaces, narrow shop isles is virtually impossible with this camera. but thats OK. just remember where it works and use another camera for narrow spaces.
Second. those 36 cameras are smartphone sensors from probably 2012ish. lets be honest. your smartphone pictures from 2012 can best be described by the technical term "big suck". Panono however have done the impossible, remember the entire system is based on online servers, they created automated vignetting filtering, and color profiling, if you look at a single un-processed image from one of the Panono's 36 cameras you will realize how impressive the post-processing really is. because when it works, the final result is a breathtakingly detailed 16,000 x 8,000 pix image file.
But even with miracles its hard to handle the root issues of those 2012 smartphone cameras, and I generally find the images have a brownish cast, which is mostly resolved by applying a curve with minus red black point and plus blue blackpoint. about 10-12 points for each. that do the trick.
For commercial jobs I use the camera mostly in the HDR mode, and Panono's servers create BEAUTIFUL files from the HDR mode.
In the single-click toss-able mode, the camera display a rather narrow dynamic range, however the coolness of the shots tend to make up for this.
Finally. The HEAT, ok this is mostly not a big issue, however, processing 36 images per click eventually over-heat the processor embedded in the camera, at first I thought this was low-battery, but if you let the camera sit for a couple minutes its ready to go again.
The Genius of Apex
Part of Jonas Pfeil's genius idea was the build in accelerometer, from the very beginning the "ball camera" was designed to be tossed into the air, and predicting the top of the movement, to capture a spherical image at the top of the motion when the camera for a split second hangs almost still without motion. ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT.!
I just can't emphasize enough of fun it is to walk around a event tossing a green camera in the air for event spherical shots. its fast, its fun and its guaranteed to be a conversation starter wherever you use the toss-the-camera feature.
TOSS shot from a park along the "rim of the world highway" the Panono is simply brilliant for this kinda shots,
Launching the camera I was able to see over the vegetation, notice my back turned to the sun for better catch the camera..
Downside with this amazing feature, I am unable to look casual and relaxed while trying to catch my camera falling from the sky.
BTW. Fun factoid. The toss-the-camera feature is default and always on, even if you are working on tripod in HDR using your phone to take the pictures, you can pop the camera off the tripod and toss it for a instant 360 capture.
Pro trick... you MUST learn to toss the camera without a dramatic spin, because only then will the image be clear, otherwise the shutter speed will result in crazy drag-streaks, motion blur etc.
There is a feature on the camera preventing it from taking a picture if the camera spins too much in the air. however I disabled it because many of the shots it would not take seems to turn out ok even if a bit blurred. after a while you have a good feeling for how the spin was, and if it was too crazy, just wait 10 sec and toss it again.
The camera can capture about 100 toss-single-click shots on a full charge. (about 40 HDR on tripod)
ONLINE render farm
The Panono camera is connected to the cloud via the Panono app, (iOS & Android) the app let you adjust exposure settings, and is essential for transferring images for online rendering, you can chose to download to the smartphone and then upload later via WiFi, or you can chose to upload on the go using your data plan to upload, but remember each regular shot is about 33megabytes and a HDR shot is about 120 megabytes, not all data plans can handle a lot of these.
Once in the cloud, the render farm takes about 10 minutes to process and HDR image, less for a single-click. some days probably with high work-load I have seen 20-40 minute processing times, but mostly that have not been a problem, I upload when I can and download stitched files later for final post and upload.
UPF image files
Each Panono panorama capture is wrapped in a UPF file, essentially a ZIP file of sorts. if you rename it to dot-zip you can open it and inside you find all the shots separated as individual RGB channels from each of the 36 cameras. along with a number of data-files, accelerometer, the manifest which is essentially the exif data, and a vignetting calibration file, I don't know, but Im guessing the vignetting file may be personal for each camera and it appears to be addressing vignetting for each color channel from each camera. Cool stuff really.
UPF file converter & Emergency rendering at home.
The online render-farm and the UPF files were contributed to huge panic when Panono were faltering in 2017, people envisioned suddenly owning a $1500 green brick camera.
Thankfully you can connect the camera via USB to your laptop, extract the UPF files, unzip them and its fairly straight forward creating a photoshop action to assemble and save the loose channel images out as regular JPG's in a batch folder, from there you can stitch the files using AutoPano Pro.. So.. maintain calm and keep shooting 360 please.
To make things a bit easier, there are a UPF file converter on the Panono website under the download menu, the app is a bit awkward to use, but it do a fine job at un-wrapping UPF files into a folder with a stack of JPG's and a manifest file. From there stitching is fairly straight forward. That said, I much prefer to let the online render-farm do the stitching.
On a side note, strangely the regular downloaded stitched JPG's do not contain GPS location, but if you look in the manifest file from the UPF you will find the correct GPS location in the file.
Hint hint Panono.. lets get the GPS tag back into the rendered image files from the server please.
In use
As I mentioned earlier, I mostly have been using a DSLR for commercial spherical pano-tours, however after getting the Panono, I have been using it on jobs where the distance would not be an issue. Even in restaurants. for those jobs I always shoot mounted on the monopod or a light-stand. camera set to HDR which with a appropriate exposure compensation. the camera is being operated from my smartphone, so I put the camera in position, then hide to be out of the shot, click and move on to the next position.
Keep in mind that theHDR capture/cycle time is about 60 seconds between shots because the camera need to save internally. I find the camera can shoot as much as 40 HDR images on a charge, however its going to shut-down from over-heating after about 20+ shots if you are shooting as fast as possible. its not a big problem once you know about the heat, just slow down now and then, give the camera a bit of time to breathe.
For larger shoots, if you are shooting HDR. zip-tie a power-pack to the lightstand-tripod, keeping the heat issue in mind, you should probably not expect to shoot much more than 30-40 shots in an hour with a couple 10min breaks after maybe 15-20 shots.
On the upside, if you are shooting single-shot non-HDR the battery both can go for about 100 clicks, and with a 60+ sec between shots I have not had heating problems. = 50+ shots in an hour. I still suggest keeping a power-pack on the tripod as the internal battery seems fairly small.
One HUGE feature, remember the camera was build to be tossed way up in the air. its very rugged, lets be clear, I seriously doubt it will survive a crash from 5m... But by now it have been knocked over a couple times while working paid virtual tours, falling with the monopod to the floor did not face it, the polycarbonate body protected it each time, and I got to pick it up and tell a shocked customer who just knocked it over, not to worry, this is tough stuff. that gotta be worth something.?
Who is it for?
Yeah that question. Without a doubt its a camera with a lot of fun potential.
The camera is probably a bit too costly for most entry level pano shooters.
Its going to thrill a lot of prosumers,
Its ideal for hikers and panorama event-photography.
Should you probably not base a spherical-tour businesses exclusively on the Panono, there are simply too many situations it don't handle well, however it is a great companion camera to a DSLR rotator rig.
The Future & whats next?
Obviously only a few people inside professional360 knows for sure, and they are not talking..
So I can only offer you some guesses at what the Panono owner ought to expect in the near and far future.
While owning my own Panono, I have seen several small tweaks to how the final files are, I'm thinking they are working hard at refining the render-farm.
THAT Render Farm, is probably a fairly expensive bit, probably more expensive than originally expected, Im feeling very confident we should expect to see some sort of "render farm charge" in the future. Maybe a few daily free renders and a pro and super pro all-you-can eat package situation.
I for one mostly get paid for my spheres and would be content with some kinda pay model. I still think there should be a free low-volume for fun users plan to keep the fun value for amateur users.
Things we need, we desperately need ability to adjust images manually and re-render online.
We also need ability to name and batch download folders, and to assign general color corrections to a number of images. maybe a pro level enhanced color management feature of sorts.
Sometime after all of this.... I'm sure we will see a Panono 2.0 camera. But don't hold your breath, Professional360 gmbh, need to turn a profit with the current Panono 1.0 first, and there are frankly a lot of tweaks that can still be done to the existing 1.0 camera and to the online interface, tweaks which will improve the results and cost far less to implement than building the 2.0 camera.
In the meantime a couple of fairly pedestrian firmware/app tricks would be raw-file support so we can pick color balance in post. optional 5 click HDR. GPS tag embedded in the final JPG. and force re-render with particular area fix.. maybe the force re-render use a different process to look for points and take say a couple hours to do it right.
Guessing at the 1.5 and 2.0 cameras, 1.5 could likely be the current body and mostly hardware, but with higher quality sensors preferably with higher ISO and less noise. the problem with higher resolution sensors is that larger files will also require more processing power etc, that would require a major overhaul of the current hardware, however same pixel size but cleaner wider dynamic range sensors could be a drop-in proposition.. you get the idea.
Video...????? Nah.. as much as I want a killer high-rez 360video camera.. I suspect Panono should be careful about getting into video, the power consumption goes up and the heat increase by a magnitude. and most professional 360video cameras now days are tall thingies with big cooling ribs on the sides below the cameras, I think I prefer the playful nature of the original Panono vision rather than going down the industrial spherical video path next. But thats just me.
My personal wish for 2.0 would be higher quality sensors, same file size, more dynamic range and a physically smaller camera to reduce the stitching problems.. Maybe the single biggest issue for me would be higher ISO for quality action shots in lower light and also being able to get good toss-shots at lower light. but as I mentioned before, processing create heat, etc..
I'm sure Professional360 right now are drawing plans and wondering exactly how long they can live with the original camera, Im guessing they probably can nurse it for a more couple years before they desperately need version 2.0, Time will tell.
Im thrilled with my panono 1.0. I expect firmware upgrades this year, a small revision on the app and probably improved online rendering options, but don't expect we will see a upgraded camera for quite a while.
Conclusion
Sooo, knowing about the shortcomings, is the Panono worth it..
The short qualified answer is, if you can afford it, "HELL YEAH"
The Panono camera is one of those few and rare devices that truly is more than the sum of its parts. Its a bizarre optical device that demands some understanding from the photographer, but which will reward your skill with some stunningly detailed shots when you understand and respect its operations envelope.
*Full disclosure, having developed commercial photographing content capture systems as part of my work over the years, I did not back the Panono camera, as I simply did not think they could manage to bring it to market for the money they were charging, Im truly sorry that I turned out to be right. I did not jump on the Panono camera until after it was fully available in the commercial market from Professional360 GMBH.
Good Morning Vincent, just rename it to dot txt :-)
Posted by: Bo Lorentzen | 01/27/2019 at 09:04 AM
Hello
Thank you for this article. How do you recover GPS data from the UPF folder? The.dat file opens with what?
Thank you. Thank you.
Posted by: Vincent Jeannerot | 01/27/2019 at 05:12 AM
Hey Konrad,
CityStreets and car-parks are no problem. but if you get into narrow spaces at albertsons groceries, then you are going to have some problem stitches. that said. I have shot a series of restaurant jobs without problems, just tried to not get smack on top of tables and chair backs in the frame kinda.
Hope this helps.
Bo
Posted by: Bo Lorentzen | 12/13/2018 at 04:30 PM
Hi
Excellent detail in your review and only review on the web apart from Mic Ty of 360 Rumours and he is a fan but not as much detail as this, so thanks, I am keen now.
However I have a query re appropriate distances as mentioned in your review as follows:
"soo wide spaces, narrow shop isles is virtually impossible with this camera. but thats OK. just remember where it works and use another camera for narrow spaces."
Would you recommend using in City Streets or large car parks referring to your wide spaces remark above.
Thanks again for the excellent review.
Posted by: Konrad Roberts | 12/13/2018 at 03:31 PM