A panoramic head is necessary if you want to avoid parallax and/or be able to auto-stitch your images together in Autodesk Stitcher. Manfrotto, the tripod manufacturer, sells very expensive panoramic heads that aren't always efficient or effective to use. Fanotec, based in Hong Kong, is the manufacturer of Nodal Ninja panoramic heads, and other related products, of which are distributed by Bill Bailey, LLC dba Nodal Ninja in the USA.
The best is Nodal Ninja heads are well built and have a high degree of accuracy. Nodal Ninja sent me their brand new NN5 to review. The NN5 is a spherical (it allows you to create 360 x 180 degree panoramas) panoramic head with two arms, capable of carrying camera gear of up to 10 kg. Basic design elements include 15 degree positive locks on the upper rotators, small footprint rotators, closed rail design for securing your camera, large turning knobs for easy adjustments, reversible detent rings (the detent rings serve to click-lock your camera’s position every n degrees), with the lower rotator having adjustable tension levels that can be locked in place.
The whole package comes in a very nice semi-hard case with soft padding. The NN5 has a spirit level, but Bill Bailey, Nodal Ninja’s, Director Global Salesand Marketing sent me an additional piece of equipment, the EZ-Leveler, a tripod base plate with huge copper adjustment screws carrying its own bubble spirit level. The EZ-Leveler allows you to level your equipment in a very accurate way using three over-sized adjustment screws, and without any effort at all.
Nodal Ninja delivers the system complete with spare parts, including washers. There is also a small hex key tool for releasing the standard installed detent ring and replacing it with another one (or reversing it so you get larger degree increments).
The upper and lower arms of the NN5 have exact rulers for measuring what is called the “lens’ pupil entrance settings”. This entrance pupil as I call it for short, is the floating point inside your lens (or outside—also possible) where the light refracts or reverses itself before continuing to the image sensor or film plane. The entrance pupil is different for each lens and for each focal length of a zoom lens.
Accuracy is necessary for automatic stitching
For this review, I’ll go through every detail of the NN5 for two reasons. The first is that panoramic heads are considered as somewhat exotic tools. I’ve seen amateur photographers brag about their skill to shoot perfect panoramas without any help from a tripod or any sort of head at all. I’m sure their images look great, but if you want to use a panorama for infographic purposes, and certainly for use in a QuickTime VR “movie”, your panoramic images will have to be as accurate and correct as possible.
The second reason is that I have rarely encountered equipment with such a high quality of build. In fact, the NN5 is used—although not recommended by the manufacturer—successfully for batch panorama stitching, which requires very tight manufacturing tolerances, so that lower degree rotation than the detent rings allow, become possible.
When the NN5 arrived, all I had to do was to assemble the upper and lower arm myself. This is done by simply attaching the arms to each other by tightening the large screw at the bottom. The whole system is then ready for use. The arms are made of black anodised aluminium and weigh about 900 grams. When disassembled, the unit is quite small—I was surprised by the carrying case being that small, as it looked much bulkier on the images I’d seen on the web.
The base rotator goes on a tripod mount adapter. The base supports both 9.5 mm and 6.3 mm tripod mounts. It has a smaller detent lock turning knob on top of the rotator base, a large knob to disassemble the rotator base for easily exchanging detent rings, and a medium-sized turning knob at the side to unlock the rotator itself. All the knobs come with a rubberised knurled grip which makes handling extremely easy.
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Click-locks on both arms
The smallest click stop possible is 10 degrees, but if you loosen the detent lock button on top of the base, you can move the camera in 2.5 degree increments. The upper arm has a comparable locking mechanism, but that one is less sophisticated because your most urgent need is for horizontal granularity, not vertical. Having said that, even the positive locking sytem for the upper arm allows you to precisely lock the vertical rotation in 15 degree increments. This is very convenient when doing multi-row panoramas.
The upper rotator 15 degree positive lock system can be switched on and off by simply turning a lever without haveing to remove your camera. Most parts on the NN5 panoramic head are made of metal, with the exception of rail stopper parts which are in plastic. The crucial parts are made of brass or copper and everything, including the measure ticks, is made for accuracy. Ruler ticks, for example, are not just painted on top of the rails, but engraved with a white paint on top, so that wear and tear won’t affect the NN5’s accuracy in those areas.
What I noticed when I had assembled the NN5 spherical panorama head was that everything can be very tightly fixed, yet remains quite easy to loosen. The rubber grips on the knobs allow you to firmly grasp them and loosen them with moistened hands or gloves.
A second thing that became apparent is the sturdiness of the arms. Before attaching my Sony Alpha 700 with the Zeiss 24-70 mm zoom lens and vertical grip with two batteries installed, to the NN5’s own camera plate I weighed the camera and my scales stopped at slightly under 3 kg. That’s still 7 kg below the NN5’s theoretical maximum weight of 10 kg, but it’s quite heavy nonetheless.
Nodal Ninja NN5 Panoramic Head Review
Even with this weight, the NN5’s arms never gave way, not as much as a fraction of a millimeter. Three kilograms is the upper limit of the EZ-Leveler, so I was still on the safe side, although only by a margin. Nevertheless, the EZ-Leveler performed great too, offering an astonishingly easy way to level the whole system on top. The EZ-Leveler is built in aluminium, with its moving parts in brass. It looks good and breathes quality of build, just like the NN5.
Setting up the Sony Alpha 700 with its Zeiss lens and vertical grip proved to be painless, although at the time of the first installation, I did not know the lens’ entrance pupil yet. The NN5 is designed to accept all types of cameras, including medium-sized cameras, so you’ll first have to align the centre of the camera lens with the large upper detent knob on the base rotator. To that effect, the knob has a clear marking—a sort of bull’s eye—to align without problems. The upper arm positioning of the camera depends on the lens entrance pupil, and the latter had first to be determined.
This proved to be the hardest part of setting up my panoramic system. You must first get to know the pupil, and to find that out, the Nodal Ninja web site has a number of nice links where experienced photographers explain how to go about. The NN5 manual explains the process as well, but forgets to tell you that the distance between the closest object and furthest object for determining the pupil should be quite large in order to discern the differences that you must observe.
I’m not going into detail; you can find the best explanation in my opinion here.
The NN5 adapts to any camera
Once I got the idea, it was easy to position the camera correctly on the upper arm. With the plastic stoppers on each arm, you can simply lock the camera in place. Now when I had set up the Alpha 700 with the Zeiss lens in its 24 mm position, I thought that I had found something slightly less well thought out about the NN5. The camera plate has nice measurement markings on its side, but they don’t run through to the bottom end of the plate.
If you must note down the entrance pupil for your lens because you plan to use different lenses for different purposes, you must know what marking to align the lens to on the measurement ruler tick of the upper arm. As it so happens, the ticks on the plate’s side and those on the arm are too far apart to accurately align them (and I mean within a millimeter). I was quite convinced I had found a flaw—albeit a very minor one.
After two successful panoramas stitched in Stitcher, I already realised that one millimeter won’t matter much but still, with everything else so carefully thought out this one small piece of the system was perhaps harder to use—especially for people with spectacles—than it ought to be… until I re-ran the entrance pupil determination task again for another focus point. As I went through the trial and error stages, I suddenly discovered one marking line on the bottom of the plate, running through all the way, and clearly visible.
The only criticism I can have is that you should remember to always fix the plate the same way forward as those marks are not dead centre, but aligned with where the plate is fixed to your camera, which may be slightly forward or backward depending on which way you fix it to the camera.
Auto-stitching possible with NN5
With everything in place, I now could try out some decent panoramic imagery. If I would have doubted that you really need a spherical panorama head before, I quickly became convinced of the use of a head like the NN5 when I clicked the automatic stitching button in Autodesk’s Stitcher Unlimited. My previous attempts with panoramas dated back from a year, and I could never make Stitcher auto-stitch more than perhaps three of the 40 to 70 images I’d shot. Shooting the images themselves was a pain as well; it took me over half an hour trying to correctly align each image so Stitcher would get its required 30 degree overlap.
With the NN5, I took 102 images for the full 360 x 180 degrees panorama in shortly less than a quarter of an hour and Stitcher auto-stitched no less than 82 of them. The images Stitcher wasn’t capable of auto-stitching only required me to calibrate the program again to account for the difference in angle of the lens when taking the upper and lower rows.
My advice is that if you’re going to venture in panoramic images, you would seriously consider the NN5 because it has room to grow. That you need a panoramic head of the best quality you can afford no longer needs explanation or justification in my opinion. If you’re going to use panoramas in online publications to deliver a better visual user experience to content consumers, my tests show even an inexperienced user can save valuable time and create more accurate and better-looking panoramas with a panoramic head than without.
The Nodal Ninja NN5 is an excellent choice in terms of accuracy, quality of build, price, and its availability worldwide. And the people behind the company are knowledgeable and helpful, while the Nodal Ninja web site is knowledge base on panorama shooting.
