QuickStitch 360

Rating:
Updated: 20 Sep 2000 at 5:00 GMT, by James Rigg [Panoguide]

At first sight Quickstitch and PhotoVista look very similar. The main interface is simple and easy to use, but unlike PhotoVista, Quickstitch 360 hides all the questions about the camera/lens from you and works it out for itself. Alignment is also automatic but you can adjust the alignment before stitching and adjust the brightness of images to compensate for exposure differences. The reason for all this is to make your life easier. For SLR camera users like me this is not necessary because I know the lens characteristics and it doesn't bother me to have to tell the software. However, with digital cameras it is not always so easy to know what the effective focal length of the lens is... at least with Quickstitch 360 you don't have to know anything about the camera.

There is of course no need to have any manual controls, or so we are told by several manufacturers in this review, so what are we worried about? Not much it seems. Quickstitch 360 does a good job of stitching without needing you to tell it what you used to take the pictures... until you use a wide angle lens. Enroute say Quickstitch does not support fisheyes but that it does support lenses with a focal length of less than 28mm if the "wide angle lens" setting is selected (which presumably compensates for barrel distortion). The performance tests tell a different story: the blending algorithm could do with improving and so could the handling of wide angle lenses.

For those of us interested in being able to print out our pictures and not just produce QTVR like movies Quickstitch has a very unfortunate arbitrary limitation - it will only use your available RAM and will not exploit virtual RAM (i.e. disk space). This means unless you have a ridiculous amount of RAM you cannot stitch very high resolution images (e.g. photo CD).

Quickstitch 360 looks good and is promising, but without better support of wide-angle lenses and better handling of large images Quickstitch is not for the professional. This might be the stitcher for you, but consider the competition (and prices) carefully.

If you still haven't decided whether Quickstitch is for you, the decision is probably made for you by knowing that Enroute have discontinued all their still image stitching tools (Quickstitch, Quickstitch 360 and Powerstitch) in favour of video solutions.

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