The Yasuhara Madoka 180 lens has a 182-187° field of view and the image is a complete circle inscribed inside the sensor borders. Aperture f8 and f11 seems to give the sharpest edges while maintaining sharpness at the center. The largest aperture, f4, is still fairly sharp. f8 also gives the least amount of sun flare when pointed 30-45° away from the sun. When the focus ring is set to infinity, depth of view is from approximately 1.5m to infinity. A complete panorama has a resolution of about 6000 x 3000 px on a 16mp APS-C camera.

The sharpness gradually drops towards the edge of the image, but the edge is very compressed because of its orthographic projection. The center 120° is excellent, with the next 20° poor, and the last 10° unusable. It's possible to complete the sphere in a row of 4 shots and 1 hand nadir, but PTGui has problems generating control points at the edges. The software developer is working on a solution to the problem. In the meantime, I found it easier to stitch with a row of 6 shots, and I usually do this anyway to reduce sun flare and body shadow by shooting diagonally (indrectly) to the sun and my own shadow by standing on either side of the monopod (when shooting left of shadow, stand right, & vice versa).

I would recommend shooting 1 hand zenith if there are lots of detail needed to be captured. If you do not want to shoot the zenith, then a tilt of at least +10° is needed to capture an acceptable sharpness at the zenith, but the softness at the nadir will grow. Tilting down will give a sharper nadir, reducing the size of the patch needed to have a seamless blend, but a hand zenith shot would be required. I would recommend shooting at 0° tilt and adding a hand nadir and zenith.

(Performance described is approximate and vary on individual settings and modifications. Fasteners are sold and shipped separately.)

The Nomad Panohead X has multiple tilts of 0°, ±4°, ±8°, ±12°, & reversed +19mm offset for poles. However, only one tilt can be used for each panoramic, since the vertical position of the lens is different for each tilt. The reversed position moves the lens in front of the edge of the pole, and reduces the pole footprint to 0-2° for poles up to 45mm diameter. This is useful for high poles where a small footprint is needed. With the lens in front of the no-parallax-point, parallax will be smaller with higher poles where objects in the scene are farther away, but will be noticeable if shot near to the ground where objects are closer.

I would recommend for maximum portability to shoot with a fixed tilt version, but if you need to shoot in a variety of environments and on a high pole, then the X multi-tilt version would be a good solution.

(Performance described is approximate and vary on individual settings and modifications. Fasteners are sold and shipped separately.)