nodave3d,
You don't need a 128 to do panos but the bigger the better if you plan on doing several & even moresso if ya plan on using several frames for each as opposed to just two frames. The 8mb card the camera came with can't even hold the maximum 10 frames the camera will do for a single pano @ 1600x1200/SHQ.
Considering you have AEL & Elements or any number of stitch capable software. If you're good with overlap & consistantly level horizon over all the frames. the Oly feature isn't really needed (Right Inigo?) Inigo was nice enough to repair this for me (click on pic to view in it's entirety)
but the OLy feature does tag each frame with an Icon & a number to make them easy to find in a folder full of thumbnails, viewed in CamediaMaster, as well as CamediaMasters greatest redeeming quality of being able to do a relatively easy one-button auto-stitch & the blue grid that appears in the EVF/LCD sure takes alot of guesswork out of the proccess at the time of the taking, especially handheld.
Any brand card can be made Oly/Pano capable but it takes some doing & might not even be possible in XP or if it is there may be some workarounds that have to be made.
It requires a reader that comes with the SMPrep Format feature & you have to Hex-Edit the SMPrep.EXE to add Oly's specific pano tag & you have to do it twice & then it's a two step proccess using those two Hex-Edited SMPep files, on the card, in the reader.
The other nice thing about the grid in the EVF is the ability of being able to follow the area you want to cover with the camera rotated in potrait aspect to get a deeper pano since you can use the arrow buttons to change the direction of the grid in which to follow the horizon in that aspect. Basically doing a vertical pano sideways. You do have to make sure the grid is set up for the direction you plan on following or the auto-stitch will do the stitching wrong..
All of which can be done without any camera assistance but it is alot easier for me with the Oly feature. Zio readers & Dazzle readers are the ones that seem to be the most readily available but there are several others that also come with the SMPrep too.
Hopefully someone will post the link to the page with the Hex-editing instructions. I've even kept Win2k on my machine along with XP just for this reason...SMPrep has helped me bigtime in the past with my cards for another totally unrelated problem.
I've pano-enabled cards for others for free (Email me) but I make no gaurantees & don't pay any of the postage. It's a one-time proccess unless a pano-enabled card gets formatted with the native/un-hex-edited reader SMPrep.exe which wipes the Oly feature from the card. This is my favorite pano to date & needed no tweeking after the Camedia Auto-stitch (3 vertical frames, hand held with arms resting on the car)
Pano's are a nice way to get Ultra-High Rez pic too...
New to digital cameras so please bear with me.....currently I have
an olympus c2100 that I purchased a few months back...the little
time I have used this camera so far I have enjoyed the experiences
and am looking to purchase compatable cards that work with this
camera other than the Olympus brand....Going to London in the mid
spring and will be taking lots of photos of the town and the
country sides and from there a train to Muich, Germany so I would
be interested in some panorama shots which if I understand
correctly must be at least a 128mb card......So my main concern is
purchasing non-Olympus cards that would be compatable with panorama
and general pics features...I would love to hear from users good
and bad experiences from different brands of cards
Thanks
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