Manfrotto Pixi Pano360
Andy Westlake tries out a motorised panorama head
£124.95 www.manfrotto.co.uk
LOTS of smartphones and cameras feature autostitching panorama modes, and when used properly these can give excellent results. However, keeping a camera level as you sweep it across a landscape is difficult, and failing to do so can produce wobbly horizons.
Manfrotto’s Pixi Pano360 aims to fix this problem. It’s a remote- controlled, motorised head that’s designed to hold your camera level and rotate it at a constant speed for perfect panoramas. The company is also pitching it for video and timelapse shooting, and claims it will work with cameras weighing up to 2kg.
With a solid-feel metal construction, the Pano360 comes across as a well-made product. It has a base socket to screw onto a tripod, but is also stable enough to sit directly on a flat surface. Strangely, it doesn’t have a camera plate as such, just a rotating spindle with a 1/4in screw onto which you can fix the supplied iPhone or GoPro adapters (to attach a camera, I used a third-party quick- release clamp). There’s just a single physical control, which is a small power button with an embedded-status LED. It’s also used to switch between controlling the device from either the included Bluetooth remote or your iPhone.
The circular remote control first has to be paired with the device itself – disconcertingly, it doesn’t work directly out of the box. It has two buttons in the centre that rotate the head left or right, surrounded by four circular buttons for panorama, timelapse and video modes, alongside power on/off. But these buttons are difficult to distinguish as they’re marked solely by near-invisible mouldings, which is a serious flaw.
The device’s load capacity is decent. It worked happily with my Sony Alpha 7 II and 24-70mm f/4 zoom, giving good results at focal lengths from 24mm to 35mm. Beyond this, though, the camera’s sweep-panorama mode stopped working due to a too-fast rotation speed and I could find no way of slowing it down. This fixed rotation speed is also a problem for video: taking 14.5 seconds to complete a full 360°, it’s too fast to give comfortably watchable footage. For time-lapse the rotation is much slower – but again, you have no control.
Verdict
The Pixi Pano360 is a strange product, and unusually from Manfrotto it feels as though it hasn’t been properly thought through. However, the hardware is pretty good, and if Manfrotto could upgrade the smartphone app to give programmable control over the head’s rotation speed, direction and angle when using a conventional camera, it could be a really useful device. At the moment, though, it’s just too limited for the price.