Originally posted by AfterPentax Mark II I had the MZ-5 as well and I liked the Panorama setting. Some laboratories did not print the Pano at Pano size: They made a large print and cut off the black top and bottom of the picture. As it was not a real Pano film some automated printers did not recognize it as a Pano and they were handprinted and the sides cut off. Nice way to make pictures of towers and spires.
It depends on the printing machine. The masked-off panos were "real Panos" back then. For a minilab machine a multi-frame pano would have been tricky... I don't think the one I used could have done it...
The fancier machines would switch lenses and print as long as they could depending on the paper mask.
The less-fancy machines needed a manual lens swap, just like you would do for printing an 8*10 or 5*7 print, or anything from 110 film.
The one I used was less-fancy, but with the right lens would print I think 3*10 inches or something like that, on 6 inch wide paper, limited by the mask.
We still had to chop off the top and bottom of the image, but it was a lot bigger than 2*6 or whatever it would have been on a regular print.
Since I was the one running the machine, I would just arbitrarily print panos from regular negatives if I wanted one for myself (not often). Then I could chop the top and bottom anywhere I wanted and still have something that fit the frames... so I never really used the pano setting...
-Eric