Morpho’s Quickpanorama vs. Nokia’s slowpanorama.


Settings

Quickpanorama Pro, WXGA (1280x800)
In my tests, I used the highest settings available for both programs.
With Quickpanorama, you can change the resolution of the image captured, and that’s the only setting which is costumizable. The highest resolution available is 1280x800.
Lowering the resolution doesn’t do very much, the image quality stays the same.

Nokia Panorama, Image resolution: high, autofocus: off
The settings for Nokia Panorama are a bit more customizable; you can change the image resolution, autofocus function, and whether you like your pictures cropped or uncropped.
I played around with the settings a bit, but nothing magical happens.
A lower resolution only changes the resolution of the picture – what a shocker. It doesn’t seem to speed up the post processing anyway, too bad.
The autofocus is pretty useless in my opinion, since it doesn’t do very much on long distance shots. And aren’t those the shots we usually take when capturing panorama’s? But i guess it could be useful for indoor or macro panorama’s.


Starting up

This is the to-do-list when opening Quickpanorama: open lens cover, close camera application which automatically pops up, open Quickpanorama. What’s even worse, is when you start Quickpanorama and the lens cover isn’t opened, you have to close the program and start all over again. I don’t have to explain that this behaviour isn’t very convenient, and very noob-friendly.

The same to-do-list for Nokia Panorama: open Nokia Panorama, open lens cover. Now, isn’t that simple?


Capturing a panorama

Quickpanorama: You have to keep your camera steady, by “maintaining vertical alignment with the red line as you pan to the right”. The movement of the blue and red line isn’t very intuitive, and can be confusing if you’re not used to the program. “So, the blue line is below the red one. Erm… what does that mean? Tilt? Which way?”

Keeping the camera steady with Nokia Panorama is much easier. When you tilt your phone the wrong way, an arrow points you to the right direction, no matter whether you have to tilt up, down, left or right.

Another big plus for Nokia Panorama, is that you can capture your panorama from left to right and from right to left, while Quickpanorama is limited to left to right only.


Picture time!

Five picture sets with variable light conditions. The first picture is taken with Nokia Panorama, the second one with Quickpanorama.
Note: these are not the original files, but resized by imageshack.

Sunlight



Railway station



Evening - low light



Evening - dark



Dark room



100% Crops



As you can see, Nokia Panorama simply blows his opponent away, in all possible light conditions. But it isn’t perfect either. Notice the black area in some of the corners of the pictures. Keeping your camera steady and panning perfectly vertical helps, but that’s impossible when capturing the panorama with your hands. And I don’t think a N900 camera stand yet exists?
Also note that in extreme low light conditions, both applications act jerky. If there’s not enough light in the picture, they lose tracking. City skylines shouldn’t be a problem, since in those conditions there’s enough artificial light in the background. But capturing a panorama in a really dark room… forget it. But then again, who on earth shoots panorama pictures like that?


Speed

What goes around comes around. Nokia Panorama blows Quickpanorama away, partly because of… post processing. And that’s where Quickpanorama blows Nokia Panorama away.
Post processing with Quickpanorama takes approximately two seconds. With Nokia Panorama it depends, but it’s never less than three minutes when taking a panorama with an equal angle.
And in most cases it’s even more - fifteen minutes was my personal record.
No biggie you think – i have a N900 so i can just multitask? Forget it. The post processing requires so much of the CPU that your fantastic multitasking phone freezes when you want to do something else. It’s even so bad, that sometimes the program itself freezes. Ok, it doesn’t happen a lot and there’s always power button – end task, or CTRL-backspace – X, but…


Conclusion

And the winner is… Nokia Panorama. Ok, the post processing takes a enormous amount of time, but in return you get a much higher image quality. And when you take the time to make a picture of something beautiful, what is most important? Speed or image quality?