Panoramic cameras have a history almost as long as that of photography itself, and the desire to capture the whole of a landscape has led people to some fairly extreme technical solutions. These boil down to a couple of basic options: use a really wide lens, and perhaps crop the frame to a ‘letterbox’ format, or use a normal wideangle lens but swing it around in an arc to make a cylindrical capture of the scenery.
Both techniques have advantages and disadvantages: A truly wideangle lens will have a complex and expensive construction if it is to avoid serious distortion and lack of sharpness in the corners, while a swing lens camera introduces mechanical complexity of a different type. The Victorians tried all sorts of technical solutions, which eventually evolved into highly prized 20th century cameras such as the Hasselblad XPan and the Noblex swing-lens range. Sadly, the appeal of both these systems is reflected in their high market price today.
At the more affordable end of the scale, the Russian Horizon 202 was a typically pragmatic but idiosyncratic swing-lens solution to the panoramic problem, and was developed from the broadly similar Horizont camera of the 1960s. Manufactured
