I may write up a better review of the new Canon A650 that I got for my birthday once I figure out a little more about how to use all of the fine features and get a little more experience. I’ve been too busy to take very many pictures recently, but I did experiment with the panorama stitching feature while on vacation in Waves, NC.
Outer Banks, Waves, NC

The image is large (9MB) so don’t click if you are on dial-up. Does dial-up still exist?

Upon putting the camera into panorama mode, the next step is to indicate whether you will shoot moving left or moving right. The camera then lets you take up to 26 pictures and keeps showing the last 1/3 of the previous picture on the large LCD screen as an aid to lining up the next shot.

Having taken all the pictures they should then be downloaded to a folder on the computer. This panorama comprises 13 images shot at 3 MP resolution (the camera does 12.1 MP) and then stitched using the Canon software on Mac OS X. The stitching process took about 4 seconds. I think it did a pretty reasonable job and I’m excited to try it out some more.