Well, I installed Canon's software with much resitation. I am not a big fan of the software that these devices usually come with. I find it too dumbified. To my surprise, the Canon software is quite neat. Very classy interface and organized. I specially liked the auto-stich feature. Did a pretty devent job of creating panoramas from stills I took. However, when taking vertical shots, it begins to mess up. Anyone know if Photoshop, Paintshop Pro, or other third-party software will do a better job with panoramas?

Thanks in advance...

I too have never been much for "automatic" features nor "all-in-one" video/photo "solution suites". Sometimes there are individual features that work great, but too often I feel like I am being forced into "think our way, and work with our program like this, or do nothing".

So, this is a highly individualistic thing! But I will keep your report in mind and if I get a chance to try Canon's auto-stitch, I will.

Well, after playing with it for a while, I have discovered something good and bad. I learned that the auto-stick feature does indeed allow for multiple images to keep being stacked, both horizontally and vertically. However, it doesn't "stich" the image together within the camera. It requires a software to accomplish that. It basically only keeps the last image you shot on the screen with a space to the left/right, top/bottom so that you can accurately align the next shot. I know that a lot of programs nowadays do photo stiching with ease, but I was hoping that the camcorder would do this within.

Oh well...

Well, that's a major help in the camera though to have the "edge to line up" of the previous picture displayed to you. Should help lessen needing to "waste" (as if that's possible with digital photos on erasable memory) by having lots of overlap.

Definetely does help, but it would be nice to have it automatically stich the images together for you. That way I can export it to my friend's computer already in panoramic format.

Don't bother with Canon's stitching software. It's pretty limited in what it can accomplish, and you're more or less required to shoot in the camera's "stitch assist" mode.

I don't know if things have improved since my S230, but its "stitch assist" is awful - it denies you the ability to lock focus and exposure, limits the order in which you can shoot, and is actually kinda distracting on such a small screen.

Try this:

www.autostitch.net

This is a freebie for Windows that can do amazing things with a big set of photos for a panoramic shot. It doesn't need anything special from the camera - just a big pile of photos.

You'll get the best results out of it (and probably most of these apps) if you take lots of photos with plenty of overlap. Take the number of photos you think you'd need, and then double or triple it. IGo nuts with the overlap - 50% overlap between shots is a decent target and will give the app plenty of info to match things up with.

I just did some vertical stitching on scans of 50 year old , oversize wedding album pics. Only two pics, but very flat.
I added contrast and cropped the lower half picture, to an area that had a fair amount of detail( through the middle of a hand and fingers, and am unable to find the stitching. It's great. Tried two other stitch programs first, without success, but Canon's did it just fine.

autostitch does do a great job on any number of Horizontals, even layers of them. I found no way to do pure verticals, though. And have the latest version.

The Kodak EasyShare CX7330 has a very long start-up time, comparatively. At its best it took 4.5 seconds to go from the off position to shooting mode.
Shot to Shot


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Bred
A link that has nowt to do with the Kodak EasyShare CX7330

That is a long time. I did not realize it took that long.

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