A model of hyperboloidal catadioptric panoramic imaging system is built, and equations between the maximum system field angle and other parameters of the system model are derived. The influence of the maximum system field angle on reflector surface shape, effective pixels width, system resolution and observation distance are analyzed by using quantitative analysis method. Meeting the requirements of system design, the simulation results indicate that the maximum system field angle should be less and stay as far as possible away from 105 °. The experiment results indicate that the actual maximum system field angle and the physical maximum system field angle should overlap in order to avoid system resource waste and performance degradation.