Who first discovered panoramic vision? There is not any concrete answer. If you notice the typical presentation of Chinese calligraphy you might realise that vertical panorama is a common form in use. Perhaps panoramic vision was first discovered by the Chinese a few thousand years ago! You tell me.

According to the record, the first panoramic patent was registered in 1843 but there was a long wait for the first commercial panoramic camera Al-Vista introduced in 1898. Panoramic cameras are generally divided into four categories based on the approach they use to capture images. The categories are wide view, segmented, swing lens and rotational. The first two categories are relatively more common and I personally use both of them - XPan for wide view and digital stitching for the segmented approach.

Why do people like panoramic vision? Perhaps it suits the natural movement of our heads perfectly. Just think about how many times you say yes or no with your head every day? There is no difficulty to understand that nodding your head vertically implies vertical panoramic vision and shaking your head horizontally could be interpreted as horizontal panorama. Apart from the factor of human engineering, panoramic vision also creates difference. With the popularity of 1.5:1 camera format, most people have to use this format to take pictures. Naturally panoramic vision breaks the norm and creates impact to viewers.

Does panorama suit every view and everybody? The simple answer is no even though panorama would suit many situations like group portraiture, grand scenic vistas etc. The narrow foreground space of horizontal panorama is sometimes difficult to manage. By the same token, the limited width of vertical panorama is equally hard to be mastered. On the financial side, panoramic equipment is not cheap. Although apparently digital stitching has created a whole new world for us, a proper setup for shooting perfect panorama still requires considerable investment and techniques.

Some of you might say that panorama can be created easily by cropping. Agreed. However, this also implies a loss of 40-45% of pixels, that is, your 6M digital camera would become a 3.5M one. At the time of writing, the first true 16:9 digital camera has already been introduced but there is not any production news for digital panoramic camera with at least 2.5:1 ratio. If I were a DSLR camera designer, I would consider a dynamic sensor design. Let us imagine dividing a 1.5:1 rectangular sensor with 6x4 number of sub-sensor square units. A panoramic sensor can be formed by moving the top row of 6 sub-sensor units (3 to left and 3 to right) to extend the length of the sensor. It is obvious that the newly formed sensor would become 8x3 in dimension, that is, in 2.66:1 ratio. Perhaps I would call it digital XPan! If it is too hard to swing sensor strips to the sides, there is another alternative design. We can simply concatenate two 1.5:1 sensors into one with 3:1 ratio panoramic sensor. You might argue why we cannot just simply produce a 3:1 sensor to do the job. The advantage of having 3:1 sensor is that we can make use of the sensor movement design effort for something else. In fact, this is not a bad idea although I do not know the complexity of producing sensors with 3:1 ratio. But there is one thing I know, be prepared to bring another 1.5:1 DSLR with you as panoramic vision will not work for every scene. This is exactly what I do at the moment, carry both my XPan and DSLR.

Let me congratulate you now if you are excited by the power of panoramic vision. Also, I also like to say that it will take you some time to adapt your vision to this extreme format. Practice makes perfect and I am sure you will get there eventually.