The start of the three-part custom 360 tour from a photographer, compared to Matterpoint tours. For this first part, we will cover speed, quality, and usability of the images.

Speed. When it comes to shooting your business; you want the least amount of disruption, or shortest time spent in the business by the photographer after closing. If the photographer is shooting with a DSLR, they can move faster as they do not have to hide while the camera scans. Also, they can take longer jumps with a DSLR, making for a better tour; no one wants to spend 10 min moving down a long hall. A photographer using a DSLR does have to spend more time in postproduction, but it also means they can tweak the images, and make corrections; something you can not do in Matterpoint.

Quality. With Matterpoint, you get a good image, but it does not compare to the high resolution of a DSLR. This quality gives you an advantage, as parts of the image can be fixed/adjusted; example: think the tour is to dark, it can be lightened up with DSLR images. If you have a tour with Matterpoint, you are stuck with whatever Matterpoint’s software gives you. It gives you a decent enough panorama, but it is made using proprietary software that is pay per use and does not allow much in the ability to fix the images.

Usability. Matterpoint, you get your nice Materpoint tour, and maybe if you are lucky, the connection to Google is open, and your tour can appear on Street View (don’t hold your breath, as the odds are like wining the lottery). With a DSLR, you can get individual photo spheres for use on Facebook, custom tours, as well as if from a Street view trusted photographer your tour published on Google. You can also have custom overlays of tours published on Street View, for use on your website. Those alone are not all the uses to DSLR images, but all the types of Matterpoint tour services are listed.

In part two we will be going over more on the usability of DSLR over Matterpoint.