Microsoft has finally launched its Photosynth software to the public, after teasing us with it since way back in 2006. I’ve been thoroughly impressed by all of the demonstrations in the last two years, featuring gorgeous shots from the BBC, National Geographic and NASA, and have been waiting desperately to try it myself.

Microsoft claims it can take any collection of images of the same object or location, and mesh them into a panorama/3Dish model. You can pan and zoom around one of these models, and different images will be laid together to provide more context and detail. It works fantastically well in the examples I’ve seen until now, such as this collection of images from Stonehenge.

Well, it was released yesterday, and I’ve had a go at creating a couple of “synths” myself. Sadly, I’m not impressed.

A lot of the demonstrations I’d seen used buildings, landscapes and other huge objects as their subject, so I roped in our 6’ 4” staff writer Mike Jennings for an impromptu photo shoot.

For my first attempt I got quite creative, taking 22 photos from every conceivable angle, but all of Mike, in the same pose and location, and all under the same lighting conditions. Uploading all of these shots I found that my “synth” was only 29% “synthy”, Microsoft’s measure of how many images it manages to mesh together. Viewing this was jumpy and disorientating, and had none of the smooth flow that the Microsoft demonstrations had.

I tried again, in better lighting conditions, and limited myself to pictures of Mike’s front – the common viewpoint should make it easier for the software to mesh them together, I thought. I also shot more photos, to give it more data to go on. Unfortunately, these 28 photos created only a 19% synthy synth, which is far less synthy than my first synth.

Perhaps I’m doing something wrong, but Microsoft claims that this is a simple tool which anyone with a point and shoot digital camera can take advantage of. So far, that’s not my experience. In fact, for the first 24 hours after its launch my experience was not being able to log in at all because the service was down.

I’m going to persevere and see if I can get some better results, but so far I’m disappointed by what looked set to be one of the more exciting products to emerge from Microsoft in recent years.