In the article we deal with the problem of camera positioning in sparse multiview systems with applications to free navigation. The limited number of the cameras, though makes the system relatively practical, implies problems with proper depth estimation and virtual view synthesis, due to increased amount of the occluded areas. We present experimental results for the optimal positioning of the cameras, depending on two factors – characteristics of an acquired scene and the multi-camera system (linear or circular camera setup). The results show the correlation between the number of occlusions in the scene and a gain from using camera pairs instead of uniformly distributed cameras.