But when pressing “info” button in PanoManager, the info window says that my Camera Model is S2.

Check a picture here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/7odlu8ri7yom4jk/Telegram_aolPOYwpqG.png?dl=0

Does someone have the same issue?

Is it normal, or I have received an S2 inside a X2 body?

Could some X2 owner check if they have same problem?

Thank you Micha, great and valuable information.

The tourism industry in Germany must appreciate your work on Google Street View.

Great work.

Hi Ken,

I can’t reply to your last question, because the comments level depth seems to be limited, so my answer here.

Thank your for your kind words.

The tone mapping of the Xphase software is quite basic and you get better quality by manual adjusting it. I think the best result you get per stitching to DNG and adjusting the DNG per Adobe Camera Raw. (I use the JPG output only for preview use.) At ACR you adjust the highlights and shadows, the brightness and the color mood. Also the dehaze function is useful. Don’t forget to set the ACR output to 16bit sRGB. So, the result can be saved as 16bit TIF. (TIF is faster and smaller saved than PNG. The 16bit images can later further adjusted in detail. For example often I use the soft lasso selection and local adjust the exposure/colors.
Additional Affinity helps me to adjust the horizon and to retouch the nadir in panorama mode.
The final result can be saved to JPG for uploading to the internet.

For quick snapshots I use HDR3 -1EV. It helps to avoid ghost effects by to much exposure brackets. For static scene HDR6 is better, you avoid color artefacts in the shadows and highlights are a little bit better. HDR6+ is good for very high contrasts, but is not useful for full daylight, because the shortest exposure time is 1/15.000 and HDR6+ by daylight and will run against this limit. It’s good for dark interiors with bright windows like in old churches.
-1EV is good for capturing more details in the highlights, but be careful, it can cause artefacts. In bright interiors it seems to be good to use +1EV.
I use the tripod mode always, so a low ISO is used and the images are nearly noisefree.

So far some of my thoughts about the usage. At Facebook you find a lively community.

Best-
Micha

Thanks Micha
My client can wait till March so I have a chance. Your Portfolio is great. Germany is a very beautiful country. I’ve been to Cologne a few times. Loved it there. I’m curious about your workflow. Can you tel me if you used 3 or 6 HDR or non. Did you use the stitched JPEG straight from the XPhase or the RAW files. How much color correction did you need or any other post processing. Your 360 images, and subject matter, are really good. I’m trying to get a feel for how much post production work is needed to get the quality of your images.

-Ken

Hi Ken,

I would try to get so much resolution as possible for your panoramas. I like old houses and interiors too. The key for a great experience of this places is to capture the fine details.

I would decide me between two options:

Buy the S2 and you get results like known by S/S2. Here my results by the Xphase S:
https://www.google.com/maps/contrib/111730697445555884407/photos
Later you could buy the X2 and hopeful the discount price will allow to sell the S2 and you have a not so high loss.
You tell your client that a new camera will come soon and you expect it is worth to wait. I hope he will understand that you are not the problem.

I would try to wait for the X2 since you should have less post work to fix issues.

If you don’t want to wait or to use the S2, than I would forget to use a snapshot pano camera and use a DSLR setup. Your project sounds so interesting, I would try to shot in 16k or more.

-Micha

Thanks Mic.
The job is a historic campus. The campus is an 18th century colonial village/museum. I do work for the curator on a regular basis photographing artifacts by the 100s, exhibit venues and historic recreations. They now want to have a real-estate style VR tour. The job will, in time, include all the historic buildings so I expect quite a few VR Panoramas. But this isn’t a home for sale where tour visitors, because they presumably currently reside in one, subconsciously have a certain familiarity with the surroundings in residential homes so the average tour resolution is sufficient and effective. My client’s tour visitor’s will be experiencing an environment not commonly seen. These structures still have their original 200+ year old floors, widows, fireplaces, doors, door frames, trim etc. and I need the tour visitor to see and feel the quality and the building materials not used in todays construction. The Theta Z1 is a very fine camera with excellent workflow and better than average image quality. I may yet get one regardless because it does excel in its own niche. But for this client, tour visitors must be able to “see” what it “feels” like to stand in these structures. The only way to do that visually is to convey “texture”. To see texture, as all of us here know, requires good lighting, color and contrast. But non of that is effective without the detail that high resolution provides. The information that you provide in your reviews of the XPhase Pro S and the leaked XPhase Pro X2 are very enticing. The Pro X2 could be the right tool for this job. I just don’t know how long I should try to wait or ask the client to wait. Asking a client to wait is not desirable. Thanks to you, and Ben Claremont, for making it possible to quickly decipher the litany of cameras and VR tour sites. I’m excited to make a decision and get one of these cameras in my hands and challenge it on this job.

Hi Ken, best you contact Danny from stabilizer-pro.com. How long could you wait? (Maybe in two weeks we know more. 😉 )

Hi Ken. Congrats on your new project! When you say large do you mean in terms of number of photos or the scale or what? I don’t know when the X2 is coming out. There is no trade-in afaik, but they might give a discount to existing S2 owners.

Thanks for all your reviews. They are very helpful.