The Hasselblad XPan is a legendary one-of-a-kind 35mm panoramic rangefinder worthy of its cult camera status, but at over $3,000 is it worthy of your money?
We take a look today at two affordable alternative options. The Horizont camera, and the Pentax ESPIO 120SW. Scroll down for images.
The inclusion of the Pentax in this video is more a representation of “any compact camera with a panoramic mode”.
The Pentax and any other compact you may find with a panoramic mode, don’t take panoramic pictures by capturing a laterally wider view than a normal 35mm coverage lens. They simply block off the top and bottom the normal image to create an aspect ratio similar to a panoramic camera.
So not only do these compacts not capture extraneous lateral information, they reduce even further the area of 35mm frame to mimick it. Because of this it’s very easy to argue that these cameras are not panoramic.
While that may be true, these camera’s “panoramic” modes do have advantages when you look at panoramas front the point of view of composition rather than image coverage. Not to mention cost. Which begs the question, do you really need an XPan?
35mm Panoramic Size Comparisons
For the grain-pickers.. Lets take a look at the actual sized of the negatives from these three cameras represented in the image below.
The Pentax is a standard 36 x 24mm ( aka 35mm film aka “full-frame”) with built-in masks cropping to the top and bottom to a total [reduced] image area of around 36 x 15mm.
The Horizont film negative size is 58 x 24mm.
The Hasselblad XPan film negative size is 65 x 24mm.
Horizont Camera
Hasselblad XPan Camera
Pentax ESPIO 120SW
The Horizon 202 doesn’t have any panoramic optics, it has panoramic mechanics. The Horizon 202 has a traditional 28mm f/2.8 prime lens, housed in mechanics which together categorize the Horizon as a swing-lens panoramic…