TL;DR: get your red-cyan glasses and see some amazing 3D photos from Nikon P510
Here are some of the 3d photos I took in first days of playing with Nikon P510. The 3D feature of the camera isn’t even advertised, probably because it is quite hard to use. But nevertheless the result is AMAZING!
How does it work? 3D program in camera let’s you take two pictures and combines them into one mpo file. After you take one shot (left eye) camera shows you on display how far it wants you to move it to the right (right eye) and when it detects correct position it takes second shot.
How to see the image? Ideally you will display the image on 3d tv. If you don’t have one you still may use old method with red and cyan glasses, which I had to do. There’s not much software that can display mpo files correctly, luckily nVidia software on my wife’s computer could display it very well. It even offered calibration for your glasses and monitor settings. The nVidia 3d picture viewer doesn’t let me save the results, so all pictures below are screenshots of the application window.
Is it idea? No, it is not. Two biggest issues are that:
* the pictures are taken in relatively low resolution – 1920×1080
* the pictures are taken in 2-4 seconds interval, which means that people, cars and leafs on the wind probably moved a bit before camera takes second shot. This ruins the image
Is it worth it? Hail yeah! Put on your glasses, click on the image and be awed! Feel free to download original mpo files as well.
Download DSCN0217.mpo
Download DSCN0253.mpo
Download DSCN0258.mpo
Download DSCN0262.mpo
Download DSCN0268.mpo
Download DSCN0280.mpo
Download DSCN0299.mpo
Download DSCN0304.mpo
Download DSCN0327.mpo
Download DSCN0350.mpo
Download DSCN0360.mpo
Download DSCN0412.mpo
Download DSCN0428.mpo
Download DSCN0452.mpo
Download DSCN0458.mpo
Download DSCN0463.mpo
The method of taking 3d pictures makes me curious. You can hardly be precise while repositioning a camera. Does the camera crop resulting images? If so, maybe it snaps two images in order to get proper 3d? This could be the reason for limited resolution. Just guessing.
@kołolski The camera is using 16MPx sensor to produce 2Mpx photo. The picture is cropped slightly on top and bottom in consistent manner. I can only guess that the spare 14MPx are used to grab more light (the night images are taken on 1/20 or faster against 1/2s when taking single photo) and to compensate for human error when moving.
Camera gives you some guidelines how you should be aiming – similar to the one on old “panorama” modes, it automatically detects when you moved far enough and then it takes second picture. Then it spends 1-2s calculating before it tells it the 3d image was successful or not.