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If you think you might want an XPan, spend eighty bucks on a Lomography Sprocket Rocket and see if 24x72 is really a way you want to make photographs. You see,

If you think you might want an XPan, spend eighty bucks on a Lomography Sprocket Rocket and see if 24x72 is really a way you want to make photographs. You see, the thing about the sprocket rocket is it comes with an insert to mask the sprocket holes...well and the other thing is you won't worry about dropping it because it is both cheap and rugged enough to survive three feet onto concrete and lacking electronics falling into the stream adding foreground interest to your volcanic Iceland panorama. Plus it weighs nothing. I ain't saying it is as good an Xpan, but if sharpness is the most interesting part of your pictures, it will be the cure. And with all the money you'll save you can book a nice trip to Iceland.

aeturnum 4y ago
I was lucky enough to buy my Xpan years ago, but I just want to put in a brief argument to not think of cameras lenses attached to interchangeable dark boxes. Especially now, a lot of the "value" of an expensive camera is the ability to select an interface that will best allow you to work. The Xpan, aside from having some neat lenses, is also one of the most advanced film cameras ever made. It will adjust from pano to traditional mid-roll, it will detect the film iso, it will wind the film for you. Sharpness is, imo, the least of it. All that said, getting lomo cameras to try out a format is a very good idea and one I heartily recommend.
- cesaref 4y ago
  Agreed. Another cool feature is that the film is shot backwards - it unwinds the film, then shoots the film in reverse, winding it into the canister. This way, worst case, you loose one exposed frame if the back opens. It's this sort of clever thinking that sets this up as a great camera. And I also picked one up years ago when they were relatively cheap!
- asdff 4y ago
  Aside from the pano to traditional adjustment of course, everything else, the winding and the detecting ISO is pretty par for the course for late era film cameras. My olympus point and shoot does all that and more, it also has autofocus and autoexposure (spot and area) and multiple flash settings. Canon also had some very interesting film cameras, they had the eye control AF in them and it didn't come back to the digital lines until recently afaik.
  - acomjean 4y ago
    I had a bunch of film cameras that would auto set the iso and auto advance the film. How it did this is 35 mm film had the iso and length encoded on the canister as “dx” coding. There were a bunch of sensors in the camera that measured if one of the squares conducted or didn’t. It’s kinda a neat solution and worked well. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DX_encoding https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DX_encoding And a typical reader. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Canon_eos30_dx_code_reader.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Canon_eo...
    - asdff 4y ago
      For some cameras that didn't allow custom iso adjustments (e.g if you were going to push or pull the film) you could scratch off or put tape over the dx code to make the camera think it was getting a different iso film and adjust autoexposure accordingly.
CobaltFire 4y ago
I generally try to use my own cameras to mimic a format to see if I like it, but this one does present enough of a challenge that a cheaper one to try it first might be in order. Slightly off topic, but as much as I love panorama shots I personally prefer shooting square, even for landscape. I have my Canon set to mask square for that view, though I do save the whole RAW.
KennyBlanken 4y ago
Or you can just buy a mid-range digital mirrorless or DSLR camera with a sufficiently wide FOV lens and then crop the photo. Most decent cameras offer an in-camera aspect ratio crop, or various grids, if you want to have the composition assistance. A current sony mirrorless camera will blow the XPan out of the water in every possible sense unless you're shooting VERY high quality, VERY low ISO film, and the exposure time required for working with such a low ISO film means you probably lose whatever resolution advantage you might have gained. Keep in mind this page was written over ten years ago: https://clarkvision.com/imagedetail/film.vs.digital.summary1/ https://clarkvision.com/imagedetail/film.vs.digital.summary1... Note that a Canon 40D, an APS-C camera that came out in 2007, had the image quality of medium format film, with greater dynamic range. On the full-frame front, a Canon 1Ds hit theoretical maximum signal to noise ratio at 100 ISO, and at ISO 800 still had better S/N ratio than ISO 50 film: https://clarkvision.com/imagedetail/digital.signal.to.noise/index.html https://clarkvision.com/imagedetail/digital.signal.to.noise/... Film is dead. It has worse resolution, dynamic range, sensitivity, and perhaps most importantly: workflow. Film is so dead, in fact, that in cinematography, people shoot in digital and then apply postprocessing to make it look like film. Just as one can make a pristine recording sound like vinyl, one can make a digital camera look like film, because in both cases, digital is vastly technically superior. I'm betting quite a few "I shoot 35mm film" snobs walked out of the theater after seeing Knives Out thinking to themselves "film's not dead, it's still better." They wouldn't be alone; Steve Yedlin screened shots done on film and then digital, post-processed to look like film, and industry pros couldn't tell the difference: https://www.polygon.com/2020/2/6/21125680/film-vs-digital-debate-movies-cinematography https://www.polygon.com/2020/2/6/21125680/film-vs-digital-de...
- asdff 4y ago
  People like film because its a different process. You don't have to futz about lightroom to get the tones you want. You can get great shots with a camera you got at a thrift store. The battery lasts for what, months? The high cost per shot makes you shoot more for quality vs quantity. When I bring my digital camera someplace, there is a tendency for me to take 400 shots and then have a chore later going through that in lightroom. When I bring a film camera I take only a few dozen if that, and don't fret or do any post processing because I just accept how it develops and scans at my local lab. Post processing takes time, even if you have an automatic import workflow that takes time to establish and set up and chances are you are tweaking it all the time anyhow depending on lighting conditions. Anecdotally the film lab in my city has been very busy with mostly younger people. Every time I go to drop off film I am waiting in line. People still shoot film and still buy polaroids even, despite this age of everyone having a phone that looks like a spider with the amount of lenses on the back.

aeturnum 4y ago

I was lucky enough to buy my Xpan years ago, but I just want to put in a brief argument to not think of cameras lenses attached to interchangeable dark boxes. Especially now, a lot of the "value" of an expensive camera is the ability to select an interface that will best allow you to work. The Xpan, aside from having some neat lenses, is also one of the most advanced film cameras ever made. It will adjust from pano to traditional mid-roll, it will detect the film iso, it will wind the film for you. Sharpness is, imo, the least of it. All that said, getting lomo cameras to try out a format is a very good idea and one I heartily recommend.

cesaref 4y ago
Agreed. Another cool feature is that the film is shot backwards - it unwinds the film, then shoots the film in reverse, winding it into the canister. This way, worst case, you loose one exposed frame if the back opens. It's this sort of clever thinking that sets this up as a great camera. And I also picked one up years ago when they were relatively cheap!
asdff 4y ago
Aside from the pano to traditional adjustment of course, everything else, the winding and the detecting ISO is pretty par for the course for late era film cameras. My olympus point and shoot does all that and more, it also has autofocus and autoexposure (spot and area) and multiple flash settings. Canon also had some very interesting film cameras, they had the eye control AF in them and it didn't come back to the digital lines until recently afaik.
- acomjean 4y ago
  I had a bunch of film cameras that would auto set the iso and auto advance the film. How it did this is 35 mm film had the iso and length encoded on the canister as “dx” coding. There were a bunch of sensors in the camera that measured if one of the squares conducted or didn’t. It’s kinda a neat solution and worked well. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DX_encoding https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DX_encoding And a typical reader. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Canon_eos30_dx_code_reader.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Canon_eo...
  - asdff 4y ago
    For some cameras that didn't allow custom iso adjustments (e.g if you were going to push or pull the film) you could scratch off or put tape over the dx code to make the camera think it was getting a different iso film and adjust autoexposure accordingly.

CobaltFire 4y ago

I generally try to use my own cameras to mimic a format to see if I like it, but this one does present enough of a challenge that a cheaper one to try it first might be in order. Slightly off topic, but as much as I love panorama shots I personally prefer shooting square, even for landscape. I have my Canon set to mask square for that view, though I do save the whole RAW.

KennyBlanken 4y ago

Or you can just buy a mid-range digital mirrorless or DSLR camera with a sufficiently wide FOV lens and then crop the photo. Most decent cameras offer an in-camera aspect ratio crop, or various grids, if you want to have the composition assistance. A current sony mirrorless camera will blow the XPan out of the water in every possible sense unless you're shooting VERY high quality, VERY low ISO film, and the exposure time required for working with such a low ISO film means you probably lose whatever resolution advantage you might have gained. Keep in mind this page was written over ten years ago: https://clarkvision.com/imagedetail/film.vs.digital.summary1/ https://clarkvision.com/imagedetail/film.vs.digital.summary1... Note that a Canon 40D, an APS-C camera that came out in 2007, had the image quality of medium format film, with greater dynamic range. On the full-frame front, a Canon 1Ds hit theoretical maximum signal to noise ratio at 100 ISO, and at ISO 800 still had better S/N ratio than ISO 50 film: https://clarkvision.com/imagedetail/digital.signal.to.noise/index.html https://clarkvision.com/imagedetail/digital.signal.to.noise/... Film is dead. It has worse resolution, dynamic range, sensitivity, and perhaps most importantly: workflow. Film is so dead, in fact, that in cinematography, people shoot in digital and then apply postprocessing to make it look like film. Just as one can make a pristine recording sound like vinyl, one can make a digital camera look like film, because in both cases, digital is vastly technically superior. I'm betting quite a few "I shoot 35mm film" snobs walked out of the theater after seeing Knives Out thinking to themselves "film's not dead, it's still better." They wouldn't be alone; Steve Yedlin screened shots done on film and then digital, post-processed to look like film, and industry pros couldn't tell the difference: https://www.polygon.com/2020/2/6/21125680/film-vs-digital-debate-movies-cinematography https://www.polygon.com/2020/2/6/21125680/film-vs-digital-de...

asdff 4y ago
People like film because its a different process. You don't have to futz about lightroom to get the tones you want. You can get great shots with a camera you got at a thrift store. The battery lasts for what, months? The high cost per shot makes you shoot more for quality vs quantity. When I bring my digital camera someplace, there is a tendency for me to take 400 shots and then have a chore later going through that in lightroom. When I bring a film camera I take only a few dozen if that, and don't fret or do any post processing because I just accept how it develops and scans at my local lab. Post processing takes time, even if you have an automatic import workflow that takes time to establish and set up and chances are you are tweaking it all the time anyhow depending on lighting conditions. Anecdotally the film lab in my city has been very busy with mostly younger people. Every time I go to drop off film I am waiting in line. People still shoot film and still buy polaroids even, despite this age of everyone having a phone that looks like a spider with the amount of lenses on the back.