Altia Systems, the makers of the industry-leading PTZ-killer, the PanaCast 2 180˚ 4K conference camera, has just announced the availability of the PanaCast 2s, the world’s first 5K 180˚ panoramic conference camera.

That’s 5120 x 1440 pixels or 7.4 megapixels at 30 frames per second; a 76% increase in pixel count over its little brother the 4K PanaCast 2.

But why, in a world that rarely uses video meeting resolutions of more than 720p, would you want to use a 5K camera?  The answer is the lossless zoom.

The PanaCast does away with the traditional pan, tilt and zoom (PTZ) camera, a legacy, dumb light-gatherer compared to the sophisticated, 9-processor intelligent vision system that is the PanaCast. The PanaCast cameras provide a low-distortion, 180˚ field-of-view which means you will see everyone in the room, be those close-up participants in a small huddle room or a roomful of students in a wide
classroom, and at extremely high edge-to-edge optical quality.

Now, of course, you won’t always want to see the whole 180˚ view.
For example, when a couple of people sit at the far end of a conference table, standard cameras would just present these participants as tiny, perspective-shortened individuals stuck at the end of a massive table.

So the PanaCast has another trick called Intelligent Zoom (or IZ for short). IZ detects faces and, when activated, will zoom and pan the view to optimally frame
the detected participants. If someone enters the room mid-call, IZ will dynamically reframe the transmitted image to include them. Similarly, it will automatically adjust if someone leaves the room.

What has all this to do with 5K? Well, the larger the resolution of the captured image, the greater the zoom capability without any apparent loss of resolution at the far end.  Actually, with 5K captured video working over a 720p connection, you can
(losslessly) zoom by a factor of 4.  It’s like having a standard camera with an optical zoom of 4 times but with no moving parts and delivered in a considerably smaller footprint.

This makes PanaCast 2s a great  solution for all sizes of conference room and classroom.