In-camera panoramic

I will soon be upgrading to the K20 but wish it had the Panoramic feature that is on my MZ5n. Is there any way to add this to the K20.....(download.?) I know I can crop in PS etc but it's at the in-camera framing stage that I miss the joy of seeing the image as it will be output. I would have imagined this to be a simple software fix. If this was available on any digital model
I would gladly pay a heavy premium. Any help or info?

Thanks

John Nasey FRPS

It's not available, sadly. However the latest version of PS stitches panoramas together fabulously.

I've never heard of any any downloadable add-ons for any Pentax camera firmware.

Hopefully one day an amateur genius will write an unofficial firmware with some extra features. But no such thing exists yet.

Meanwhile, you could get a focusing screen with customised crop lines from www.katzeyeoptics.com

Cropping afterwards doesn't bother me, and it's very easy. The joy for me comes with the final image on the computer or a print, not what it looks like in the camera.

Thanks jonboy It's the in-camera visualization I'm looking for.

Crop lines on the focusing screen would help visualisation.

Thanks iceblinker I hope it does come!

I will check out the link

Most of my photos are in this format, if you have ever used the pano on the mz5n it is a thing to behold!
Cheers

Firmware wouldn't help here because the MZ-5n uses a physical device to crop the image in the viewfinder.

I suppose you could be drastic, if you wanted to shoot panoramics 100% of the time, and mask off the focusing screen. Be best with a spare one, perhaps a very thin card mask could be inserted either above or below the screen? Above it may throw manual focusing out, below it may not be secure.

Just a thought... :

If you used Liveview on the K20D, you could make a simple card mask to place over the screen on the rear of the camera. You could use this to review shots you'd taken when using the viewfinder too, although you wouldn't see the effect when actually taking the pic.

Dan

All good points Dan Thanks

I wonder if a mask on the focus screen would affect the metering....

My Manfrotto head has graduated markings around the static pan part and an index on the moving part, its easy to line up the next shot.

John yearns for the panoramic feature of the MZ-5n, which were blinds that closed down in the viewfinder and also over the film aperture so that the top and bottom of the viewfinder and film were masked off to create a panoramic.

I certainly found it useful for composing panoramics when I was using film, although I would tend to still shoot normally and mask the slide off with card afterwards.

Gartmore has a good point though John, if you want the maximum quality and don't mind some photoshop work, you can take several photos across a scene and merge them with software on the computer. A handheld card mask might be useful for seeing the composition first in this case.

Dan