It costs 99 cents and transforms your iPhone into a digital emulation of the classic Hasselblad XPAN, a panoramic camera no longer produced and that would cost you a few thousand dollars.

The reception to the simple app suggests how much people want to shoot panoramic photos: XP4N is one of the most popular apps in the iPhone store. And no, there are no plans for an Android version, so if, like me, you are on Android, you’ll have to find other ways to get your panoramic shots. Cropping may be one of them, but keep reading…

The XP4N turns, as its author says, “any scene into a movie set; every shot into a movie still.” Yes, that’s the visual magic that, I guess, attracts people to the format. Based on the legendary XPAN with its unique cinematic panoramic 65×24 images, XP4N is, according to the author, “consciously made to be the ultimate one-trick-pony. A point and shoot camera with only a single button: the shutter button. The internal image processing engine does the rest, based on your preferred film mode setting. (So don’t expect deep camera controls… ;-).”

The author says that XP4N “is an oldschool 99 cent app, meaning NO ADS, NO SUBSCRIPTIONS, NO IN-APP-PURCHASES!, and the resulting images are “carefully tuned to have the pleasant silky quality of film and to get away from the oversharpened, hyper-punchy look typical of today’s digital cameras.” Making the app “is relatively easy”, according to Bram Bos; the hard part, he adds, “is making the photos coming out of your app look like film (or rather: non-digital). And ‘cinematic’ at that.”

Emulation of popular film stocks

That’s what the XP4N – Every Shot A Movie Still – does. It simulates 6 film types (inspired by Cinestill 800T, Vision 3 250D, Portra 400, Metropolis, Ortho Plus, HP5+), uses all available lenses, features EV compensation by swiping, the option to save images as lossless HEIF files and also saves EXIF and GPS data in photos. If the camera has it, it also has access to the 48MP sensor, which means the cropped panoramas will have a high-resolution.

This app is designed to simulate the cinematic qualities of the XPAN, including emulation of 6 film stocks that are often paired with this camera. Here is some detailed information about the modes available:

NIGHT MODE

Based on the Cinestill 800T film character with its moody teal cast and signature “halation” (red halos) around bright spots in the image.

BALANCED MODE

Inspired by Vision3 250D film stock, with its versatile personality and typical Hollywood-style color and contrast curves.

DAYLIGHT MODE

Based on the popular Portra 400 film; soft and warm hues and moderate contrast profile. Great for skin tones and dreamy landscapes.

GRITTY MODE

Inspired by the Lomography Metropolis film, which adds a “bleached” look that is reminiscent of gritty 90s movies.

BLACK & WHITE MODES

Following the characteristics of the Ortho Plus and HP5+ films, one mode offers a punchy and contrasty B&W style, while the other is soft and dreamy.

The app is a “work in progress”

The app is not perfect, and some of those who used it point to what they would like to see in future versions, but it’s a “work in progress” and as the author created it as a solution to his own passion for the format, new updates are promised, with more features… that make sense and that are viable for an independent app using the tech inside a iPhone.

The interest for panoramic photos seems to be growing, as the recent announcements about the development of a new Widelux camera for 2025 suggest, although that camera uses a special mode for panoramic photos. The popularity of the XP4N app for iPhone confirms that photographers want to try their hand at panoramic photography, in many cases users that never shot panoramic photos with an analogue camera.

The XP4N app recreates a classic model, the Hasselblad XPAN, a unique camera – sometimes introduced as a medium format camera for 35mm – that utilized a dual-format, producing both full panorama 24x65mm format in addition to conventional 24x36mm format on the exact same film. It was the first dual-format 35mm camera on the market that expanded the format instead of masking it, making sure that every exposure utilized the full area of the film.

The Hasselblad XPAN… and the Fujifilm TX-1

The Hasselblad XPAN was not alone, as Fujifilm had the TX-1. In fact, both cameras result from a partnership between Hasselblad and Fujifilm, with the XPAN being launched, in 1998, in the West while the TX-1 was sold in Japan. Fujifilm already had experience with panoramic cameras, albeit in medium format, with the Fujica Panorama G617, a medium format roll film panorama camera from 1983, that in 1985 was replaced with the Fuji Panorama G617 and in 1993 saw a new model, also medium format, the Fuji Panorama GX617, which I had a chance to test then, although for regular photography I used a  Fuji GS645S Professional Wide60 from 1984, which I still keep to this day. This 6×4.5 format, due to its design, has a viewfinder in portrait format orientation instead of landscape, which continues to puzzle people when they look through the viewfinder.

Fujifilm’s experience may explain why there are – continued – rumors that the company will bring back the panoramic format in a digital camera, but I don’t know how much of that is wishful thinking… because with digital you can easily crop an image to whatever format you intend. I do understand there is a special magic into looking at a panoramic image during capture, but if you can visualize the end result you aim for at the moment of capture, you can just shoot an integral frame and edit in the computer.

The panoramic mode in APS cameras and cropping…

Having said that, I understand the magic of WYSIWYG, and the popularity of the XP4N app confirms it: even if the base RAW image is different, people appreciate that the app shows them a panoramic image. Some believe this “magic” only happens through digital, but decades ago a film format offered exactly that: APS. The Advanced Photo System (APS), a discontinued film format  first produced in 1996, marketed by Kodak, Fujifilm, Agfa and Konica, offered three image formats: High-definition, which used the whole frame – 30.2×16.7 mm (1.2×0.7 in) in a 16:9 format –, Classic, with the frame cropped (25.1×16.7 mm (1.0×0.7 in a 3:2 format  – so as to look like the regular 135mm image format, and finally Panoramic with an image cropped 30.2×9.5 mm (1.2×0.4 in), with an aspect ratio of 3:1.

Although the base frame was always the same – the High-definition format – users could, in most APS cameras, shoot one of the three formats: images shot in one format could always be printed in any of the other two, because the crop was only done at viewfinder level, an advantage for a system dependent on emulsion.

Even though this is a “trick” that uses crop to simulate a panoramic image, it was very popular among photographers using APS cameras, in a clear demonstration that the “magic of WYSIWYG” works rather well. In fact, we used a Minolta Vectis SLR (that we still have around and in working order) for the APS format for a long time, and many of the images taken by me and my wife on holidays were “panoramas” because the final printed images looked so exciting when coming out of the box, although we knew they were nothing but a crop from the whole frame.

So, it makes sense that, today, an app like XP4N appears for smartphone users. Unfortunately, it’s only for iPhone. But if you’re on Android, nothing stops you from cropping any image you like to create a panorama. I’ve added an example from my series of landscapes taken with an old Xiaomi Redmi Note 10 Pro and cropped in the basic Windows Photo app… After all, any photo editing app will allow you to create panoramas…