Well, that's why smartphones decimated the dedicated camera market!
But can they do it like smartphones do? That is, I select "pano", press the shutter to start, pan the camera as much as I need (would be great if I could go up down and all around, too -- maybe I can with a smartphone, just never tried), then press the shutter to end, and it will produce the pano? Ideally, of course, I'd love that pano to be saved as a RAW, but even a tiff or png would be great.
Anyway, can you give me an example of how it's done on a dedicated camera? Preferably, on the camera that has the best implementation of it? Thanks!
Yeah, but it's it much more inconvenient: take a bunch of photos of the scene, convert one of them from RAW, save the settings used in the conversion, use those same settings for the rest of the photos, select the photos, choose "stitch", and convert. 'Twould be so much nicer if you could just get a single file out of the camera (again, as mentioned above, ideally RAW even though I know that's not happening, but tiff or png would be doable, methinks) simply by choosing pano mode, pressing the shutter to start, and then pressing the shutter again to end.
Also, would be great if it could merge photos as well. For example, I meter the scene, select "merge", press the shutter to start and end, and the camera just keeps snapping away in the interim. Then it aligns and stacks all the photos together and outputs a single file. If the pano option also did this, that would be even better!
With regards to the optimum lens, I would think that, motion blur not being an issue, I would say the longer the better (with regards to ultimate IQ). Just would take more time to cover the scene. For example, a 135 / 1.8 would produce an insanely detailed photo, but would take 7x longer to cover the scene.