(This review first appeared on MacCreate.com)

Photography has always been about capturing a slice of life yet despite a constant stream of technological changes and improvements, cameras are still limited to only one slice. The human eye is limited in its range of vision as is the camera lens, but it is connected to a massively complex brain that’s capable of piecing together multiple images into one large panoply, a mosaic that stitches myriad images into one larger panoramic.

To duplicate this effect, cameras during the film era were created that used pivoting lenses or wider openings to capture a photo on a piece of film larger than a single frame or cropped vertically in order to create an image wider than tall. That’s fine, but it’s still not as wide a field-of-view of even a quick glance around the horizon.

Fortunately digital photography can take advantage of the non-physical nature of its recording media—along with some fancy mathematical tricks—to stitch together multiple overlapping images into a single panorama. Software and hardware solutions abound for creating a single large frame from multiple smaller images.

Unfortunately, many of these systems require the use of specialized camera rigs and expensive SLR gear in order to create the desired end product. This is not the case, however, with the Gigapan Epic and Gigapan Epic 100, a blessedly simple, automated system that makes it possible to take nearly-perfect panoramas with nothing more than a point-and-shoot camera.

The consumer byproduct of the NASA Mars Rover imaging technology, the Gigapan was created thanks to research and development by the government space agency and Carnegie Mellon university, albeit in a much more terrestrial package.

Plug-and-Play
No larger than a lunchbox, the Gigapan system is super-easy to use, and is comprised of a single unit that mounts on a tripod and automatically orients a camera and trips the shutter (thanks to a small robotic arm) with just about no attention from the user.

The basic setup requires nothing more than connecting a camera to the rotating platform and pressing the unit’s back-panel buttons to align the camera’s view to the horizon. (The unit instructs the user via the rear LCD panel of the Gigapan—a panel that’s backlit on the Gigapan Epic 100—and it automatically calculates the field-of-view of lens and the necessary movement increments for perfect panorama capture.)

With a Canon PowerShot camera on our test Gigapan Epic 100 we were up and shooting in under five minutes the first time, with our first stitched panorama created a few minutes later. The device comes with a program that’s designed to stitch together the images from a Gigapan session, and then to upload those images to the Gigapan.org website, where the world can check out the panoramic creations. (Mine are available here, for example.)

Incredible Detail
One of the amazing things about Gigapan images is the level of detail. We first heard about the system when photographer David Bergman captured the Obama inauguration with a Gigapan, revealing detail down to the buttons on coats of attendees, and capturing millions of views in a few days. It was a unique look at an important historical event that caught the attention of many people.

Which is a nice thing about the Gigapan system, the images are fascinating to look at, incredibly interesting to check out in detail and brain-dead simple to create.

To set up a panorama it’s only necessary to tell the device where the top left corner and bottom right corner of the photo should lay, the internal brain calculates the number of photos needed to capture that field-of-view and the exact degrees necessary between steps. The precision motor that drives the device pivots and turns without any help needed from the user.

In one session I captured a sunset with the Gigapan while chatting with a fellow photographer who recognized my setup. Wanting to make more than one image of the same scene I simply pressed the button to restart the panorama when the first one had completed. I barely had to be around.