Wide Angle lens vs Stitch Assistant

[Karl Rove]

Basic noobie question here. My Canon S3 has Stitch Assistant so does that negate the need for me to get a seperate Wide Angle lens?

[coldrain]

Depends on your personal needs. You can make pretty amazing very wide panoramas with stitching, but a wide view in one photo at times can be wanted too.

And remember, you can't make a good stitched scene when there are moving subjects in the frame(s).

[Rhys]

Basic noobie question here. My Canon S3 has Stitch Assistant so does that negate the need for me to get a seperate Wide Angle lens?

Stitching can be excellent. It can also be very poor. A wide-angle lens generally means the variability is taken out of the equation.

[Karl Rove]

I've just done my 3rd stitch. The first two were without assistant and the 3rd with.

This is the first one. I did not take the pictures with the intention of stitching, I only found the option later in the software:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/148/385970086_0dc73e78c4_b.jpg

This one I tried using a tripod and used stitch software:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/141/385970158_c8ccbe8827_b.jpg

This one I did with stitch assistant:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/184/385970219_51987ac6ba_b.jpg

The first 2 are a joke but I can see only one fault in the last one which is on the right side.

It seems one obvious benefit of WA over SA would be the time you have to put into it. I'm going on a trip where I'd like to mazimize time spent fiddling with cameras so I need to decide which would take more time for panoramic shots; attaching and detaching the wide angle lens or taking multiple shots with SA.

Although, does a wide angle lens really take panoramic shots or does it just take shots which are wider than the regular size? With SA you can do a full 360 and piece it together, eh?

I like the other topic in this section where 2 stitched images are shared.
http://www.dcresource.com/forums/showthread.php?t=28701
Those are totally seamless.