The VR below was shot on Wednesday 8/14
The purpose for the shoot of the Waikiki Grand again (different location on the roof) was to test the Kodak DC 50 Auto Zoom Digital Camera. It shoots pictures and saves them to flash ram. You can shoot 7 great quality photos, 11 good quality photos and 22 lower quality photos. With additional PCMCIA memory cards you can store and shoot more.
The widest angle setting of the camera is at 37mm and I shot 16 pictures in a circle at the lowest setting. I did not have any memory cards to test.
I was pleasantly surprised by the results and below you'll find several versions of the same VR...the size of the image varies as I wanted to check quality.
The camera for testing was provided by Big Mike and Rolf at the MacMouse Club, a very personal Macintosh reseller with overnight repair and a real person to person attitude. They are located on top of the Waikiki Grand Hotel in rm 1005 on the Sundeck.
Please enjoy.
Taken from the Waikiki Grand Hotel
See the panorama image as a .GIF
A new shoot of Kailua Beach, around 4 p.m....nice and sunny!
See the panorama image as a .GIF
The obvious advantages to shooting with a digital camera like the DC 50 is that your VR production and turn around time is minimized by at least two days, which is the best neg to cd rom turnaround time I can get out here. And then there is the cost of the film, film development and cd roms.
Judging by the results on all of these vr pages of mine, right now the VR software itself is the low end of the resolution chain. Film converted to cd yields the finest quality but this new digital camera of theirs sure does come close and after stitching it's really hard to tell which vr was shot with which type of camera.
The Kodak DC 50 is light. Maybe too light. I'm sure that it's probably a good quality plastic casing but that in itself bothers me. It's a camera that, at over a $1000.00 a pop feels very fragile. If I was to own one, I'd definitely carry it around in a heavy duty Anvil case with a cutout foam lining inside.
If I was Kodak, I'd opt for building a model for pros with a graphite or brushed aluminum casing. Someone is bound to drop one of these puppies....and at a grand a pop and over $200 for each 24 high quality pcmcia storage card, you'd need alot of work to justify the purchase.
The DC 50 has a 37-111mm zoom lens that's wide at 37 mm. It's relatively easy to use and I'm pleased that I can mount it on the same Kaidan mount that I use for my old 35 mm.
To set up, I just eyeballed where I thought the nodal point would be, locked it in and as it turns out I was either real close or right on.
The camera has a convenient standard 1/4" tripod mount on the flat bottom. It also has a safety strap and the lcd control panel is neatly laid out. Mode, Select and Erase buttons could be bigger in my opinion.
The eye cup is real small. I would've made that and the viewer a bit larger.
Bottom line- it takes remarkably clear pictures, in all three modes. We'll need to try a VR shoot soon with a pcmcia memory card or two to see how good vr's of high quality images come out.
Kodak's software is pretty easy to use...you use it to download the pictures from the camera to your hard drive via serial cable and initially manipulate the pictures. BAD POINT: Kodak's proprietary image has to be converted to be read by photoshop and the stitching software. I made two steps..saving the Kodak image to jpeg and then using Graphicconverter, to change the images to picts for stitching.
Here are some stills I took at High Res...
Nuuanu Stream at around 5 p.m. on Thursday, August 15th.
Palolo Valley looking down the valley towards Diamond Head at around 1 p.m. on Thursday, August 15th.
Ziggy the Wonderdog with flash in the evening on Thursday, August 15th.
Tired Rab at around 12:40 a.m. Saturday at the keyboard, August 17th.
I took this shot while controlling the camera with the software. Yes - I was on the computer still.
Check out Virtual Kailua..a work in progress
