Panorama vs. Pano - iPhone Application Review
Two applications have surfaced over the past few months for creating panoramic photos on the iPhone, Pano (Debacle Software $2.99) and Panorama (i Fone Guys $9.99). Each application does exactly what it’s supposed to do, stitch together multiple photos into “seemless” panoramic image.
Here is the Pano example, made from four photos:
Here is the Panorama example, made from six photos:
Quality Issues
If you click on the photos above, you will be taken to their Flickr pages. Look at the original photo sizes and you’ll see that each photo has some “ghosting” that occurs in small portions of the image. These result from the images not aligning properly. The Pano sample has significantly larger ghosting issues, some of which may be the result of using fewer photos to pan the same range. These panoramic images are done without a tripod, so perfection is going to nearly impossible. For my money, the Panoramic App does a consistently better job of stitching the photos. However, it does require more photos to do the same job. In this sample, Panorama required six photos to Pano’s four. I don’t have a problem with taking a few more photos, personally.
They Key Difference Is The Process
In addition to the number of photos required to achieve the panoramic image, how each application assists you in aligning the images is fundamentally different. Pano uses a transparent portion of the previous shot to help you align subsequent shots. Like this:
I find the transparent image more difficult to align, especially in bright light conditions. It takes me much longer to align images in Pano than it does in Panorama. Panorama uses a different approach.
The hard edge allows me to better align one shot to the next and Panorama also seems to be less sensitive to the accuracy of the alignment. I have no trouble aligning images using Panorama, regardless of the lighting conditions. I don’t even attempt to use Pano in bright sunlight conditions.
Pano vs. Panorama: My Preference?
It’s probably obvious from the comments above that I prefer the Panorama application over the Pano application. But the Panorama application has a tendency to crash more often than Pano. I believe this has to do with how much memory is involved in processing the photos. Restarting the iPhone before using either one should clear out the memory and make each less prone to crashing, but as you add more and more photos to Panorama, you tempt fate. Neither application saves your progress, so a crash requires you to start over from scratch. Still, the clear winner for me is Panorama from i Fone Guys.
However, there is a message in the Pano for iPhone group on Flickr that indicates they have some updates coming soon that will wow us. I’ll come back and updat if they do. 
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Yep, the Panorama picture looks alot better! Cool!