GigaPan Epic stitches thousands of pics together

It seems like an age since we brought you news of an add-on device that will enable ordinary digital cameras to take whopping gigapixel-class photographs.

Now, finally, we have word that GigaPan's gadget is ready to go and that professional-quality panoramic photos need no longer take an advanced degree in trigonometry to set up.

Robot arm

The GigaPan Epic is essentially a computer-controlled robot arm that grips any compact digital camera and guides it saccurately across a scene, taking thousands of photos at points it determines necessary.

Users simply have to specify the boundaries of the panorama they wish to capture and sit back and let the Epic do its thing.

Vast panoramas

After that, supplied software stitches everything together to form a single, composite image made up of millions of pixels. The examples on the company's photo-sharing website are impressive, to say the least.

The $379 (£265) Epic is available for worldwide shipping from the company's website now, with a version for larger cameras promised soon.

[Image article source]