If you've never seen one of those, you will be ... confused. I was when I first used one sometime in Fall 2006 (it was a Widelux F6 from "The Tech", the MIT student newspaper).
There are two kinds of panoramic cameras (stitching in software doesn't count). The first kind is where the image is projected by a rectilinear lens onto flat film (like Hasselblad XPan). Those cameras are quite expensive, or large (some people use large format cameras with medium format film). The swing lens panoramic cameras have a lens that swings around in an arc of a circle. The film is not flat like in conventional cameras, but rather bent in an arc. The nice thing about this arrangement is that the lens can be quite small (since it only covers a small portion of the film surface at one time), and the field of view of swing-lens cameras is 120-140 degrees. That's crazy-wide, without the funky edge-effect of ultra-wideangle lenses.
I have never used a flat-film panoramic camera (unless cropping large format film counts). I had lots of fun with the Widelux F6 mentioned above, but it broke on me a few times, film winding/rewinding was difficult, it didn't have a film advance lever, and its winder/rewinder cut into my skin when I was doing it fast (which I did a lot). I shot 4 rolls of slide film at my graduation in June 2007 with the F6 and the sunny16 rule and it was lots of fun.
When I moved to Berkeley, for grad-school and the resources of the MIT yearbook (Technique) and newspaper (The Tech) were no longer available. I can't use the darkroom for free, I don't have access to free film or dedicated film scanners :(
In mid december this year I made myself a Christmas present, and helped the economy (Amazon) by buying the Horizon Perfekt swing lens camera. It is part of the Lomography family (a bit pretentious on their part, if you ask me). Anyway, the camera arrived in this cool box, with a leather case, a hard-cover book with panoramas, and instructions. The leather case, even though cool looking, was smelly and moldy. It smelled like the drug cabine of an old lady. I cleaned it up with ethanol, but it still stinks, so I don't really use it.
Right now my film scanner is dead, I sent it back to Nikon for repairs, so I could only make a few scans with the Canon 4200f flaatbed scanner, which has a 35mm adapter. The colors in these slides are quite dull due to the scanner's limitations. Otherwise, I am very pleasantly impressed by the Horizon. I will post more photos as I go.
Merry Christmas, and may Santa be generous to you.
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