Patent US 6,192,196

A panoramic camera has a camera housing rotatable about an axis of rotation that defines a viewpoint which points along a radial optical path that object rays traverse as the camera is rotated about its axis; a lens assembly having an optical path and a front nodal point mounted for rotation with the camera housing with the optical path of the lens offset from the radial optical path; a specular assembly including an object specular member along the radial optical path mounted for rotation with the housing that cooperates with the lens assembly for gathering object rays that traverse the radial optical path and for deviating them along the optical path of the lens assembly in such a way that the front nodal point of the lens subassembly virtually appears to lie on the axis of rotation thereby eliminating image smearing; and has different ambient light responsive controller embodiments operative either to continuously vary or to preset exposure, or to base exposure on a control sinewave whose phase is obtained either automatically via table look up of latitude or longitude coordinates or via GPS input or manually from a sun protractor and whose amplitude is obtained either automatically from the same information and/or manually by operator keypad input. Means are disclosed for allowing the selection of different near- and far-field object distances and for allowing framing (both vertical and angular) of the panoramic subject. In one embodiment, the specular assembly has object and lens mirrors that pivot between open and closed positions. Different embodiments have film or digital image recording devices.