which digital camera has these features?

[Anders]

I'm after a digital camera (not DSLR) with the following;

1) Colour temp control using user set K value

2) Panoramic shooting

3) Half decent zoom (min 10x)

I'm taking skyscapes and I need a camera which will give me good picture quality with colours true to what I see in the sunset/sunrise/skyscape.

Any recommendations greatly appreciated!

[Kym]

G'Day and welcome to the site.


Most Digital Cameras have 3:2 or 4:3 ratio's. So use a wide angle lens or stitch multiple images together for Panos.

Big zoom often leads to degradated image quality unless you pay big bucks.

Everything is a compromise.

As for true colours, shoot raw and adjust whitebalance as needed in post processing.
Most Digital Cameras let you se WB by K or via preset.

Check the New to Photography forum equipment guide before purchasing - lots of good advice.

[ricktas]

Seeing you do not want a DSLR you might like to look at the new range coming out like the Olympus Pen and the Sony NEX. They offer you a 'bridge' between the general point and shoot camera and a DSLR, with the ability to change lenses to cover the different shooting scenarios.

Agree with Kym. Shooting several frames as stitching them in an editing package produces the best pano's, unless you want to get a true panoramic camera, but they cost big $$$

[Anders]

Hi Rick,

Thanks for the suggestions, i'll check them out.

I've tried stitching several pictures together adobe photoshop and found that I cannot get the accuracy/alignment correct when I take the shots. Consequently it's impossible to align in photoshop - when I align one part some other section is out. I guess my shoots are not taken in the same plane?

Any tips to correct this?

[DAdeGroot]

Hi Rick,

Thanks for the suggestions, i'll check them out.

I've tried stitching several pictures together adobe photoshop and found that I cannot get the accuracy/alignment correct when I take the shots. Consequently it's impossible to align in photoshop - when I align one part some other section is out. I guess my shoots are not taken in the same plane?

Any tips to correct this?

If you're on Windows, check out a free program called AutoStitch. It does an amazingly good job of correcting for some of those errors.

At shooting time though, make sure you remain level, and overlap each shot by at least 30%. That will give the software something solid to work with.

[ricktas]

Hi Rick,

Thanks for the suggestions, i'll check them out.

I've tried stitching several pictures together adobe photoshop and found that I cannot get the accuracy/alignment correct when I take the shots. Consequently it's impossible to align in photoshop - when I align one part some other section is out. I guess my shoots are not taken in the same plane?

Any tips to correct this?

Yes, get a good quality tripod that allows locking of two dimension rotation whilst allowing the third (panning) to continue, and use it all the time when taking Pano's. Or you could buy a specific tripod panoramic head.

[ashey]

Hi Anders if you are serious about panos I found this yesterday it,s a robotic system that will take as many shots as you want and do all the stitching for you and it is reasonably priced I think here is the web site, gigapansystems.com/-. Can be used with quite a few different cameras.

[OzzieTraveller]

G'day Anders

Firstly - welcome to the AP Forum - as you will have noted already, there are lots of great people who will offer you helpful advice

You are asking for help/info for a new camera - okay
The Panasonic FZ-28/FZ-35 will do almost everything you ask for - certainly 1) & 3) on your list
As to panos - most of us use multiple exposures and stitch the images together, as it gives better results than the in-camera preset pano operations

More info-
The in-camera pano operations are designed for 2, maybe 3 exposures and always in landscape (horizontal) mode. This is not always the best format, as you end up with a long, skinny image
The better way of achieving a pano is to 1- put the camera into portrait (vertical) mode, and 2- tripod mount the camera, lens as near perfect to horizontal as possible, then 3- take 6-8 images with plenty of overlap for each image

By having plenty of image-overlap, the normal-everyday optical distortions of the outer edges of the lens are minimised, as the stitching program joins images together using parts of the image "1/2-way out to each edge" (make sense??)

In my early pano days, I also tried photoshop pano stitching and found it severely lacking.
However, there are many pano stitching programs out there - I now use Pixtra, a very capable program (costs about $50) whose abilities always surprise me, and its help files put microsoft office to shame ... amazing for a small business to make it this way

Hope this helps you a bit ... please come back with more Qs as they arise
Regards, Phil