The Largest Digital Photo

Gigapixel writes to point us to what is claimed to be the largest digital photo on the Net, at 8.6 Gigapixel. It is a composite photo of the "Parete Gaudenziana," a fresco painted by Gaudenzio Ferrari, dated 1513. This fresco is in the Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, in the convent of Varallo Sesia, diocese of Novara and Province of Vercelli, Italy. The site uses Flash to let you explore the fresco over a zoom range of more than 180 to 1. The photo is made up of 1145 images, each 12.2 Mpixel and 16 bits per color channel. Read on for more technical specs of the photo.

Photo Shots: 1,145
Computed Data: 84 Gigabyte
Computed Pixels: 13,982,996,480
Color Depth: 16 bit per channel

Cropped Image Size: 8,604,431,000 (w. 96,679 x h. 89,000) pixel
Image Size before the final crop: 10,293,864,000 pixel (w. 103,560 x h. 99,400) pixel
Size on Hard Disk of the 3x16 bit final image: 51,625,586,000 byte

Size of Photographed Scene: 10.80 m x 9.94 m (35.43 ft x 32.61 ft), corresponding to 107.35 m² (1155.37 ft²).

True Scale Resolution: 227 dpi
Pixel Density: 80 pixel/mm²
Linear Pixel Density: 9 pixel/mm

Hard Disk space dedicated to 16 bit computing: 1.8 Terabyte
Ram: 16 Gigabyte
Processors: 4 x AMD Opteron(TM) 885 Dual Core 64 bit

Shooting on January 30, 2006
Shooting time: 13 hours
Computing time: 3 months
Final Image generated on June 15, 2006

Comments

Wow - worth checking out

[Salvance]

The site is pretty slow to load up initially (understandably with the flash), but it's worth taking the time to view this fantastic work. The clarity and detail are superb, you can see every brushstroke, chipped paint flake, and any little imperfection (all in a Google Maps-esque viewer). I've never seen such detail firsthand at a museum!

What's amazing is that in 20-30 years, it wouldn't be unreasonable to believe that consumer cameras would be capable of taking the same picture at the same 13 gigapixel resolution, and still have enough room left over to store 1000 similar pictures.

Re:Wow - worth checking out

[imsabbel]

No, they wont.
Sorry to break it to you, but image sensors arent cpus, so there is no moores law or anything.
There is stuff like "physics" and "optics" that have to be taken into account.

To get that kind of resolution out of a single camera you would neeed lenses that are heavier than you (just to beat the diffraction limit), not to mention that the sensor would need to be HUGE (we are at 2-4 um^2 pixel sensor size today (and thats bad already for various reasons). It should be obvious why getting smaller 500nm or so isnt a good idea (hello wavelenght of light?!). Not to mention that the real bad "noise kills everything" would start quite a bit earlier.
This big detector size would again demand better lenses... (think of large format, but with a need for precission like the best 35mm optics.

The only way to do it, in a handheld camera, would be if some breakthrough would enable negative reflraction index lenses (they can be _perfect_) and then using some ultra cooled detector.
Even then the exposure times would be quite long just because of the quantum efficiency.

Re:Wow - worth checking out

[jedrek]

What's amazing is that in 20-30 years, it wouldn't be unreasonable to believe that consumer cameras would be capable of taking the same picture at the same 13 gigapixel resolution, and still have enough room left over to store 1000 similar pictures.

Heh, don't I wish. But unless we reinvent optics as we understand them right now, it's not going to happen. 16-22mpx out of a normal 35mm sensor is a limit for *lenses*, with maybe some of the best of breeds being useful at 30mpx, but not more. A lot of really smart people are saying that the megapixel war is going to seriously slow down (especially in pro cams, it's still going to be a selling point in consumer cameras). The consumer DSLR bodies are already surpassing the abilities of consumer lenses as it is right now. Look for cameras with better dynamic range and high iso quality.

Re:Wow - worth checking out

[Salvance]

OK, so I can concede that physical gigapixel cameras may be unrealistic, but couldn't effective gigapixel cameras exist? For example, if a single pixel camera as referenced this past week on /. could take high resolution shots, couldn't they stretch out the technology to work for ridiculously hi-resolution photos?

I'm not an optics expert, just a tech optimist. 10 years ago I interviewed at IBM when they were working with Cyrix to match Intel chips. The engineering Director that interviewed me went on and on about how it would be impossible to create chips below 100nm (or .1 micron as he said) due to some type of Quantum interactions. Yet today Intel is testing 45 nm chips, and Cyrix is forgotten.

Someone will always find a work-around to push a technology's limits well beyond the end point demarcated by yesterday's experts.

Re:Wow - worth checking out

[iammaxus]

Have a little more creativity. As the parent (and child) was trying to suggest, there are so many amazing ways that technology has surmounted so many previous "physics" barriers. How about this as a little potential example. You take your 2016 camera which has a measly 10 or 20 megapixels but incredibly processing power and storage and pan it over the fresco back and forth, not very carefully, and it's intelligent algorithms (and maybe built in accelerometers or other motion tracking) patch together what you are imaging into one large image.

Hell, that's a pretty boring extension of todays very real and practical technologies (I know a team at my university that is doing almost precisely that for aerial photography), why not turn the camera around while you are at it and image the room from a few different angles, get some other art work and sculptures and have the camera create an incredibly detailed, textured 3d model of the entire room?

Anyone who has seen the last, incredible 40 years of progress in technology would be pretty close-minded not to see "gigapixel" and more cameras in the next 10 or 15 years.

Re:Wow - worth checking out

[Mike89]

What's amazing is that in 20-30 years, it wouldn't be unreasonable to believe that consumer cameras would be capable of taking the same picture at the same 13 gigapixel resolution, and still have enough room left over to store 1000 similar pictures.

It's ironic that you say this and your signature reads "Say No to Crack" ;)

Re:Wow - worth checking out

[ExploHD]

The site is pretty slow to load up initially

and it just got slashdotted...

Re:Wow - worth checking out

[rolfwind]

Where are our flying cars predicted 50 years ago? They should have been here 10 years ago already.

Let's face it, we progressed a lot in the last 50 years in some areas but not so much in others. Often, we don't overcome the predicted physical limits not by advancing the same technology, but we do find new ways to attack the problem that are more efficient.

That said, nothing is a given, even gigapixel digital consumer size cameras in 20 years.

Re:Wow - worth checking out

[jdcool88]

I don't know about 13 gigapixels, but a 4 gigapixel camera already exists.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,66498-0.htm l

Re:Wow - worth checking out

[CrackedButter]

I had read in a UK photography magazine that in the near future, photography will actually be captured on video. Instead of using a camera to get the decisive moment captured in a single frame, photographers might use high resolution video technology to get their shot (lazy maybe?). You can do it now if you wanted, my Fuji S7000 (6 megapixel) shoots in video mode but the resolution sucks (640x480). Put a res of 1600x1200 at least and your original idea is off the ground. All those images shot together, then seamless added together, you got yourself a gigapixel image! The entire movie, Corpse Bride was shot using 2 or 3, 16 megapixel Canon cameras just so you know. (Obviously, those images from the movie are placed after one another instead of being placed next to each other). By the way, in the 2016 most cameras (including the shittest ones) will be well over the 20 megapixel mark. A lot of them are now, the highest you can get (as far as I know is 16 megapixel canon SLR and I read somewhere that Hassleblad have a 32 or 64 megapixel camera for sale.

Re:Wow - worth checking out

[Fred_A]

Except it's not a digital camera. It's a film camera, the output of which is scanned to produce 4 Gpx images. You can see it as a 4Mpx toolchain if you like.

Re:Wow - worth checking out

[Anonymous Coward]

Helicopters?

Re:Wow - worth checking out

[wolf369T]

Imagine, zooming on Google Earth into that Museum, into that picture, and get that details. Imagine zooming into ANY Museum and into ANY painting and getting that details... I bet I'll can see my own daindruff on Google Earths then.

Re:Wow - worth checking out

[peragrin]

The average person can barely pilot on a 2 dimensional grid. Flying cars are always going to be unrealistic for the average person. The current reasons why you don't see more of the ones that do exist, is fuel. They haven't made them fuel efficient enough to be practical. burning 10-20% of your fuel just for take-off, and then again on landing doesn't help when your only carring a couple of gallons to start with.

Re:Wow - worth checking out

[Txiasaeia]

"Put a res of 1600x1200 at least and your original idea is off the ground."

I don't know about you, but I don't know a lot of photographers that would consider 1600x1200 an acceptable size for a photo. Hell, my entry-level D50 takes shots at roughly 3000x2000.

"All those images shot together, then seamless added together, you got yourself a gigapixel image!" You're missing the idea of angle. Imagine the following: you're looking at a work of art 20' by 20'. It's huge. You're standing at the foot of the painting looking up at it. You carefully take a picture of each of the individual sections, hoping to reassemble it at home. The problem is that you're talking a picture from the bottom looking up, so you're getting all these individual sections on an angle, rather than dead on. When you take your pictures home, you would have to adjust the angle for each section, meaning that the lower pictures will have a higher resolution than the top pictures - if you want a dead on squared photograph of the art. When I take a shot of the horizon and it's only a degree or two off, I correct it by rotating it back in the other direction. The image, previously rectangular, are now angled, and triangle sections from all four sides need to be cut off in order to get a rectangle back. This is only correcting one angle; taking a picture of a picture and correcting the angle could theoretically have problems in all three dimensions: distance from painting, vertical pan, and horizontal pan. You've got a great idea, but the base megapixel resolution will still need to be high in order to negate resolution loss from angle problems.

"By the way, in the 2016 most cameras (including the shittest ones) will be well over the 20 megapixel mark."

Remember that megapixels aren't the best way to judge how good a camera is. You probably know this, I'm sure, but depending on how the camera is built, a 20 megapixel camera could take less quality photos than a 2 megapixel camera.

Re:Wow - worth checking out

[clockwork_orange]

"negative reflraction index lenses (they can be _perfect_)"

in principle they can be prefict, however you are still limited by how smooth the surface of the negative index lense. variations in the surface would casue diffraction, it would be far better than a normal lens, but still you can never be perfict.

Re:Wow - worth checking out

[DanielNS84]

They're right here! http://moller.com/ But that doesn't mean they're for everyone...nor perfect yet...

Re:Wow - worth checking out

[CrackedButter]

I agree with everything you said because thats what I meant, I had hoped I explained it enough to show that I understood and want to further expand and put across that what the parent had said, was plausible. The only trouble was I couldn't really articulate what I wanted to say this morning very well and had hoped somebody wouldn't pick my point apart too much. :) With regard to the last sentence, we weren't talking about the quality of the camera sensor. I was just thinking the parent poster was underestimating our level of progress from now till 2016.

Re:Wow - worth checking out

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.gigapxl.org/

The camera isn't digital and it isn't hand-held, but it has some nice results non-the-less.

Re:Wow - worth checking out

[Speare]

Again, no. The "one pixel camera" is a misnomer because it makes you think of the size of one photosite in a regular camera. It has one very large/good sensor and a TON of support structure. You can't just cram a few million of those things into the same camera box.

Re:Wow - worth checking out

[zaqattack911]

I have no idea what you just said, but since you used the term "quantum efficiency".. I have no choice but to believe you :)

Re:Wow - worth checking out

[Anonymous Coward]

it wouldn't be unreasonable to believe that consumer cameras would be capable of taking the same picture at the same 13 gigapixel resolution

Yeah, it would be unreasonable to believe that. Considering how you can't get a 13 gigapixel resolution on a camera. If you're thinking 13 megapixel, it's already here, the Canon 1Ds-Mk II N can take 16 megapixels IIRC. It's certainly not a consumer camera, but a prosumer camera, but the difference is time and price drop. What has been discovered though is that above 12 megapixels the high resolution merely shows up imperfections in the lens (this is exacerbated by the multiplier effects of cameras that aren't full frame). So if it ever did reach consumer level, it'd just make your pictures look worse by making your shoddy lens (and at consumer level, they're all shoddy) look as bad it is but displayed larger.

Re:Wow - worth checking out

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"Where are our flying cars predicted 50 years ago? They should have been here 10 years ago already."

That's more of a driver problem than a hardware issue.

Re:Wow - worth checking out

[nolife]

Flying cars and "fly by wire" transportation ARE possible right now and not restrained by physics or mechanics. They are not around because they are not economical.
For technology to get to the masses, it has to be something of desire or benefit and be available at a resonable cost.

Re:Wow - worth checking out

[ChrisA90278]

No, consumer cameras will not record 13GP. Basic physics will prevent this. Pixels need to be a certain minimum phtsical size. If they are two smallthen not many photons bump into them. Light comes in packets called "photons" as this will not change. A 13GP sensor will have 114,000 pixels across each edge. So yu muliply the mini um pixel size times 114000 and you gt a sensor that is physically to large to stuff into a reasonable sized camera. And then how big is the lens that can project an image circle to cover the sensor>

Some things don't scale. You can make electronics smaller but things that measure and interact with the real world are many times constrained by the real objects they need to interact with. An obvious example is the bathroom scale. Could you make one that is 1/2 inch square? Yes but you wouldn't want to. Same with a 13GP camera.

Re:Wow - worth checking out

[DestroyAllZombies]

It's a good point about the angular deformation, but the camera already has distance information from the range finder. This could be used as a starting point to correct the angular problems. Of course the resolution of the farthest points would still be less. The vertical and horizontal pan could be corrected if there were overlap areas.

This would require massive CPU firepower in today's terms, but very possible later. Also, if overlapping or movie data were available, then processing could be used to lower the effective resolution of the final photo by combining images.

Re:Wow - worth checking out

[Peteee]

why not turn the camera around while you are at it and image the room from a few different angles, get some other art work and sculptures and have the camera create an incredibly detailed, textured 3d model of the entire room?

Like this http://labs.live.com/photosynth/whatis/

Re:Wow - worth checking out

[Phat_Tony]

Someone will always find a work-around to push a technology's limits well beyond the end point demarcated by yesterday's experts.

Examples of where some experts were wrong about the limits to technology does not imply that there are no limits to technology. Some expert assessments regarding the limits may be wrong, while others are right.

I'm not going to pretend I know what proposed limits to technology are solid and which aren't, but here are some to think about. Many physicists think that time travel (at least restricted to back-in-time case) is impossible, and progress on time-travel technology in the entire history of the world is pretty much 0. And while the 100nm limit to silicon feature size was wrong, I suspect the quantum computability limit (the maximum density of computations if every quantum particle were utilized as a computer) presents a pretty hard limit on computational power and an upward bound for the end of Moore's Law. I don't think the laws of thermodynamics will be broken any time soon either- no perpetual motion machines and all the free energy, etc, that they entail. Likewise, for pictures, I suspect it will be difficult to create a camera that does any better than recording the wavelength and direction of every photon that encounters it. Some limits are "made to be broken," and I'm confident that others won't be. Again, these were just examples of some that I think are relatively solid, and I'm not entirely sure of any of them. What I am sure of is that there are some absolute physical limits governing what can be done, and sometimes, the expert's proposed limits on technology will be absolute.

Re:Wow - worth checking out

[JSchoeck]

"negative reflraction index lenses" Materials with negative refraction indices have already been created two or three years ago. They are made out of different components which together do the trick. Don't ask what it was, search Science or Nature and you'll find probably more than one article. Yey material and nano science ;)

Re:Wow - worth checking out

[Charcharodon]

Take a look at www.panoramafactory.com

Just one of many stiching programs out there. There is no reason why something like this couldn't be built into a camera within a year or two. You want a giant picture? Take 5-10 photos and let it stick it all together.

It would be even more interesting if the software got smart enough to not only make flat images but composite 3D photos just based off of a series of 2D images taken of an area.

Re:Wow - worth checking out

[rrohbeck]

Whatever happened to the camera that can displace the sensor by minute increments using piezoelectrict transducers, getting subpixel resolution that way?

Re:Wow - worth checking out

[The Wicked Priest]

Examples of where some experts were wrong about the limits to technology does not imply that there are no limits to technology. Some expert assessments regarding the limits may be wrong, while others are right.

"They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." -- Carl Sagan

Re:Wow - worth checking out

[rolfwind]

I have seen this thing in the past on the Discovery Channel numerous times. From what I read at most credible places (not saying the wiki link is credible, simply convenient) it appears to be vaporware more or less:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moller_Skycar

But I would love to be proven wrong.

Re:Wow - worth checking out

[trentblase]

ok so... .4um (wavelength of upper visible light spectrum) * 114,000 = 45.6mm... compare to 35mm and we're talking the same order of magnitude.

Re:Wow - worth checking out

[trentblase]

ok, so I should have used .7um (aproximate longest wavelength of visible light) and 136,424 = 95mm, which is medium format

Re:Wow - worth checking out

[ChrisA90278]

No, the pixel size is not related to the wavelenght of light. The pixel simply needs to be large enough in square area that some light hits it. Think of a buket outdoor catching rain. A large diameter bucket will catch lots of water but a small drinking glass will catch less. Now think of a soda straw turnned vertical. There is a chance that very litel or even no drop fall down the straw. The straw is so small that the amount of water collected is more goveren by luck then the amount of rainfall.

Apixel has to catch photons and it has to catch enough of them that the resulting charge closly matches the the amount of light reflected from the pixel's projection onto the subject. 0.4um would be a very small pixel. The Nikon D50 camera has pixels about 8um which are 20X larger and have 400X more area. It would be resonable to make pixels 1/2 this size but not 1/10th. OK let's assume 1/4 the size of the Nikon D40 that is 2um. This works out to a focal plane sensor of about 200mm across.

Some day it might be possible for a consummer to photograph a large ceiling like this but it would be by moving the camera and taking multiple frames and later stitching then together.

in short, photons are like rain, they come in packets and a rain collector needs enough square area to collect a statistically significant number of photons. You can solve this by using more light. A huge flash or using the camera only in direct noon-time sulight but still a 13GB sensor will not fit into a reasonable size camera.

Re:Wow - worth checking out

[trentblase]

The MINIMUM pixel size is certainly related to the wavelength you want to detect. Considering that we can build chip features in the 45nm range, a .4um detector is not outrageous. You are overlooking the fact that there are multiple ways to increase the number of photon samples you collect. One is ambient light. Another is exposure time. Alternatively, you could just accept a tradeoff between a small sensor and noisy image. It's still 13GP.

Now we need wall displays.

[headkase]

Now we have wall sized wallpapers we just need a wall display system for them. I can't wait :) Downloading wallpapers for my walls is going to be awesome :)

Re:Now we need wall displays.

[rf0]

You are going to need a very big printer with a roll on one end to get them printed out or could you just stick up loads of sheets of letter :)

Re:Now we need wall displays.

[headkase]

I was thinking as it as more of a screen/monitor that just happens to be wall sized! Throw video on it too and go back to wallpaper when your done!

Re:Now we need wall displays.

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill Gates' house does that.

Soup-rise, soup-rise, right?

Re:Now we need wall displays.

[hackstraw]

Downloading wallpapers for my walls is going to be awesome

So true. This is coming too. With epaper and the like, and with the higer res HDTVs that are wall mountable, getting this stuff to be thinner is just a matter of time.

I think it would be the shit to be able to have even a static display cover every inch of a wall. You know when you pick a new wallpaper with your computer it doesn't look the same as the thumbnail, be it better or worse. You never really know until you try. Doing that with a real wall would be killer.

Now with this image in question, I'm not that impressed:

True Scale Resolution: 227 dpi

Yeah, its big, but 200 dpi is nothing to get that excited about.

Huh?

[Achromatic1978]

If a composite photo is eligible to be called "the largest digital photo on the net", then sorry, wrong...

What about Google Earth. That's a huge scrollable and zoomable digital photo, bigger than Gigapixel's efforts.

Stitching together 40x40 digital photos = cool.

World's largest digital photo it is definitely not.

Re:Huh?

[klang]

This camera, http://www.gigapxl.org/ takes 4 Giga pixel in one shot .. now, that's cool.

Stitching 40 X 40 pictures together is just a lot of work.

Re:Huh?

[Achromatic1978]

Uhhh? No, it doesn't.

It's a FILM camera: http://www.gigapxl.org/technology-format.htm

If I scan a polaroid at 20,000dpi, it could be a gigapixel image (note I've not done the math, replace the dpi as appropriate).

Not to say the idea isn't impressive, and high res (it is/was a spy camera, after all).

Re:Huh?

[r3m0t]

No, because when you zoom in you often see entirely different things. (If all the roads were part of some giga/terapixel image, zooming out would show you sort of yellow-white blob. It doesn't.)

Similarly for the satellite images. At different levels, it shows you different images.

Re:Huh?

[mei_mei_mei]

"At different levels, it shows you different images."

Yes, there are lots of very large images there, one for each zoom%. The largest is the most zoomed in.

Re:Huh?

[klang]

truth be told, this is the first time I notice, that gigapxl is not a true digital camera.. (I kick myself at the moment)

In their defense, they have made the calculations to make sure that they have enough information to work with. I think this is as much like "cheating" as stitching a buttload of digital photos. Furthermore, the gigapxl camera is usable for "things that move", whereas the stitching really isn't .. unless you have 40x40 cameras..

Furthermore; GoogleEarth is still bigger, as noted in parent.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely. The gigapixel camera is a fantastic idea, taking the cold war technology and using it in such a way. :)

Re:Huh?

[AnswerIs42]

Problem with that idea is that the images are only about 100k in size per tile per tile and greatly reduced in pixel size. So no.. GE doesn't even compare to this gigapixel image. You are comparing an Apple to a Car.

Re:Huh?

[Achromatic1978]

images are only about 100k in size per tile per tile

And? So there's a difference between, say, 10,000,000 100k image tiles, and 100,000 100mb image tiles? One is inherently superior?

Re:Huh?

[rgmoore]

In their defense, they have made the calculations to make sure that they have enough information to work with.

Not really. There are two big problems with their 4 Gpx claim:

• Their MTF calculations are flawed. They calculate as though you can guarantee a given spatial resolution by ensuring that the MTF for each step is above the final desired value, when you really need to ensure that the combined contributions from all steps are above that value. To make an analogy, it's as though they were trying to design a 50% efficient car and used a design parameter that the engine, transmission, and final drive system should each be at least 50% efficient at the desired speed. In reality, if each part is only 50% efficient then the whole will be much less than 50% efficient.
• All of their calculations were made with a 1 Gpx final image size in mind, but they've since arbitrarily bumped their scans to 4 Gpx. Even if their original calculations were correct, you can't do that. They may generate an image with more pixels, but there isn't enough information in the negative for the higher frequency scan to be worthwhile.

Re:Huh?

[swillden]

If I scan a polaroid at 20,000dpi, it could be a gigapixel image

It would, but you wouldn't be able to zoom very far before you had no detail at all. The polaroid camera's lens and film don't have the resolving power to make that useful. The gigpxl people, OTOH, use huge cameras with huge lenses (adapted from spy plane cameras) to accurately focus light onto a very large sheet of high-quality film. Scanning that at high resolution gives you a gigapixel image that still shows detail even at a 1:1 zoom (one image pixel per screen pixel). Take a look at some of their imagery before you dismiss is.

Re:Huh?

[bill_kress]

That was my first thought. It zooms in exactly like Google Earth. That means there is an application on the PC to render it exactly like google earth--it also means that the pictures that compose it are downloaded from the web dynamically, exactly like google earth.

Anyone want to calculate the number of pixels available in Google earth?

Also, why can't cameras do live panning yet? In order to create a large photo you should be able to put it into "pan" mode, tell it how much area you want to capture (so it can set the viewfinder resolution) then move the camera back and forth. It would "paint" the image on the viewfinder as you move the camera around--just keep moving the camera until the entire viewfinder is "painted".

Wouldn't work very well for moving subjects, but there is nothing technical to this--it's just software. (Well, you have to be pretty good at keeping the lens at the exact same point then rotating around it, otherwise you'd get distortions--but nothing worse than conventional panorams).

Re:Huh?

[pilkul]

When I read FILM in all caps in your post I spent a few moments puzzled, having never heard of this F.I.L.M. acronym nor what kind of fancy new technology it might stand for. Focused Interferometric Laser Motion? I think I've been using digital cameras for too long...

Google Maps is a bigger photo.

[Anonymous Coward]

The zoom-and-scroll features of this website seem just like Google Maps.

Yes I know it's pieced together from satellite data.

Re:Google Maps is a bigger photo.

[Thong]

So is this...

Talking about google maps...

[HateBreeder]

Wouldn't that constitute for the "biggest digital image on the internet" ?

Okay, so it's stitched together... but so is this one.

Re:Talking about google maps...

[nachmore]

I think the point is they took all of these photos and instead of storing them as separate layers somewhere they combined them all into one huge photo:

Size on Hard Disk of the 3x16 bit final image: 51,625,586,000 byte"

Whereas Google Earth and the like, obviously, have more data they are still stored as separate images... (not sure why they needed to connect this one up into one image either, but it must be easier for them to analyse like that)

Re:Talking about google maps...

[Curtman]

Whereas Google Earth and the like, obviously, have more data they are still stored as separate images... (not sure why they needed to connect this one up into one image either, but it must be easier for them to analyse like that)

Maybe they couldn't get their hands on one of these.

Re:Talking about google maps...

[briancnorton]

Not true

Google Earth pulls from ONE BIG flat file. It's the same kind of technology that pixia uses. These extremely large files are much faster than databases because of pyramid layers. (reduced resolution data sets) The Keyhole Fusion that you use to add to a skin stitches it into that file. (Yes, it has variable resolution)

Actually pretty cool

[amplusquem]

If you click the link and view the picture (its in a flash document), it's actually pretty amazing. The detail is incredible, you can zoom in incredibly far and still get a crystal clear image. Here is the technical data...

Picture:

Size: 8,604,431,000 pixels
Size Before Crop: 10,293, 864,000 pixels
Colour depth: 16 bit per channel
True Scale Resolution: 227dpi

Data Processing:

CPU: 4 x AMD Opteron 885 Dual Core 64 bit
RAM: 16 gbs
Disk: 1.8 terabytes

I don't think we're going to be seeings these kind of pics on the average website anytime soon ;)

Re:Actually pretty cool

[Traf-O-Data-Hater]

Track 45 left.
clickclickclickclickclick
Stop.
Pull back, track right.
clickclickclickclick
Stop.
Give me hard copy right there.

Re:Actually pretty cool

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think we're going to be seeings these kind of pics on the average website anytime soon ;)

Well, this reminds me of Seadragon http://labs.live.com/Seadragon.aspx; using their technology this should not be
such a problem. Coming soon? (You'll probably have seen Photosynth http://labs.live.com/photosynth/?)

Re:Actually pretty cool

[rHBa]

It's all very impresive, them taking such a huge picture and all but that's not what you're looking at here. If the image we're all looking at was 50gig, I just panned across the whole thing (side to side) at full zoom in less than 2 minutes. Assuming a stripe accross the middle at full zoom is 0.5% of the whole image (I suspect it is more) that means I just downloaded ~250MB in under 2 minutes and I'm on a 2mb ADSL connection.

Re:Actually pretty cool

[Lactoso]

Kudos for the obscure Blade Runner reference!!

Re:Actually pretty cool

[Malfourmed]

Yes! That was my reaction exactly!

I had great fun zooming in on the flowers behind the grille below the fresco, or looking at the detail of the two paintings to the side of the fresco, or checking out what appears to be a security device on the left hand side. But still couldn't find a woman in a bath.

Jesus Christ! [it's a lion, get in the car]

[AEton]

Because of the way the painting was centered, if you start out with the default view and zoom in -- all the way in -- you are treated to a sudden and rather unpleasant close-up of Jesus's crotch. On the cross.

Thanks a lot, Slashdot.

Re:Jesus Christ! [it's a lion, get in the car]

[syousef]

It's all part of the promotion for the upcoming musical: Jesus Crotch Super Star.

Re:Jesus Christ! [it's a lion, get in the car]

[Anonymous Coward]

The power of Christ compels you!!!

Re:Jesus Christ! [it's a lion, get in the car]

[tehcyder]

Also, there is a shot of two lesbians pleasuring each other orally in the bottom left corner, but you have to zoom in a long way to find it.

Filesize...

[Boogaroo]

51 gigs per picture? Nice, I could keep eight!
Printing it? Only takes 2 years to process to the printer. You're in no rush right?

Hmm, I think I'll go take a 10 gigapixel picture of my... my motherboard! Yeah, that's it.

Re:Filesize...

[tehSpork]

Pah. I could hold just below 50, and that's just on my main computer. Of course, I'd have to get rid of all the useful stuff already on there... :(

Re:Filesize...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, I think I'll go take a 10 gigapixel picture of my... my motherboard! Yeah, that's it.

That level of detail is required to give justice to your "motherboard" ?

Re:Filesize...

[Barny]

Hrmm, may need more HDD space to run Vista.

*cough* yeah, sorry, it had to be said :)

Google maps, satellite view.

[Anonymous Coward]

Um... if you're counting composite imagery, google maps is covering most of the planet. How many terra pixels would you guess that is?

Re:Google maps, satellite view.

[dotgain]

terra pixels

Oh har har bloody har!

Good Idea

[dcapel]

Find one of the largest files on the Internet... Check.
Find a site with a large amount of people browsing it... Check.
Make a post interesting enough that people will look at it... Check.
Watch your victim's bandwidth bills skyrocket... Check
Smell the great smell of burning silicon... In Progress

Linking directly to one of the biggest files around on Slashdot.
Sheesh.

Re:Good Idea

[tehSpork]

Note that they are smart and don't let you simply download the picture, instead you have to use their (undoubtedly resource intensive) flash interface to view finite bits of the gigantic photo. Too bad too, I for one would have loved to watch MSPAINT croak while trying to load such a massive image. Memory segmentation fault anyone? :)

Re:Good Idea

[FirienFirien]

That's why the tune to the page is now Mozart's "Lacrimosa" from Requiem. It was probably Sanctus earlier (a lot more glory-to-god going on) but after seeing what was happening to their poor server they'll have decided to change it... /wonders if he should get + or - geek points for recognising specific Mozart sequences...

Re:Good Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Note that they are smart and don't let you simply download the picture

Exactly. It's kind of like saying it's stupid for slashdot to link to google because we are going to cost them a fortune downloading the god-knows-how-many-TB of data that their indexing database contains.

Awesome

[scoot80]

I'd like to see him do it with the single pixel camera now! :)

Well

[Kangburra]

The pictures are kind of okay in a geeky way, but the sound is crap!

How about a picture (and sound) of Kylie or something?

Re:Well

[Sinbios]

It's the Lacrymosa from Mozart's Requiem. And it's spelt kyrie, which is Greek for "Lord".

Really though, considering the size of the image they're hosting, they can't even use a 320kbps mp3 or something to accompany it? My track is only about 7MB.

Re:Well

[Kangburra]

And it's spelt kyrie, which is Greek for "Lord".

I will email Miss Minogue right now! ;-)

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you want to have a large picture and sound of an ugly hag that can't sing?

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

320? they are already using up all their bandwidth :-D

Re:Well

[prichardson]

"And it's spelt kyrie, which is Greek for "Lord"."

Oh dear...

It's spellED kyrie, which is LATIN for "Lord". The requiem mass is a catholic thing, not greek orthodox.

Re:Well

[1locs]

The Kyrie is most certainly Greek, although it was retained intact in the Latin liturgy. The full version is "Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison." The Latin for Lord is "Domine" and the Latin translation of the "Kyrie eleison" is "Domine, miserere."

Lets just hope

[antifoidulus]

the goatse man doesn't learn of this technique....

Website Optimized for..

[mr_stinky_britches]

While I am waiting for the site to load, I get to stare at ugly yellow on gray text at the bottom that says "Website Optimized for Microsoft(R) Windors(R) & Internet Explorer(R)".

I'm just taking a wild guess here..but something tells me this guy didn't use the gimp to stitch all these photographs togehter..

Re:Website Optimized for..

[Sinbios]

Is this a problem somehow? Does it make the image less worthy of our haughty viewing? Oh noes, the guy isn't a purporter of alternative software!

Re:Website Optimized for..

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm just taking a wild guess here..but something tells me this guy didn't use the gimp to stitch all these photographs togehter..

Something tells me that you did not use Firefox 2.0. But does that really matter?

Resolution

[Raptoer]

Pixel Density: 80 pixel/mm2 I can understand a couple pixels/mm2, even a couple dozen for very detailed stuff. But 80... 9x9... those pixels are so small that your eye would have a hard time perceiving it.

Re:Resolution

[realnowhereman]

Depends how close you are to it. Your eye would have no trouble seeing a feature that is 0.1mm. A typical technical pen set would have the following nib sizes: 0.13, 0.18, 0.25, 0.35, 0.5, 0.7, 1.0, 1.5, and 2.0.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_pen

Torrent

[veldstra]

can be found where?

Re:Wow

[Total_Wimp]

I'm surprised and pleased to see Slashdot posting religious images of the Christian variety

Couldn't quite tell if you were being serious, or exactly which part you may be joking about, but, for the record, it was a story about digital photography, not about religion. If I had mod points, your post would simply be off topic.

I hate to be so humorlous, but people get foocused so tightly on certain emotional subjects that they sometimes refuse to see what's really going on. Religion just happens to be one of them. I could give you a thousand examples (well maybe really just a dozen) but yours will do just fine for the moment.

Digital photograhy of a painting: YES

Story about religion: NO

adios,

TW

A Related Question...

[SirWinston]

On a related note, does anyone have suggestions for good compositing software (on any OS)? I've been "archiving" my vintage one-sheet (usually 27" by 41") film poster collection by scanning at 600dpi in 16 overlapping segments, but I haven't done any of the compositing yet. One issue I had is that my old scanner did an automatic color adjustment which left some segments with a slightly different coloring than others, and I'm hoping there's a good compositing application that can compensate for this well enough without me having to manually adjust the color in each segment first.

So, what software would you recommend for compositing groups of 16 overlapping images? Hopefully there are a few good alternatives to try out.

Re:A Related Question...

[Anonymous Coward]

This might not be exactly what you are looking for, but maybe...

http://gug.sunsite.dk/tutorials/woc1/?PHPSESSID=11 cac8f0a67d00d32c3f73b81a592429

Re:A Related Question...

[daverabbitz]

If you're using *nix you might want to look at using the nip2 frontend with the VIPS system (vips.sf.net?), It's freakin' brilliant for working with enormous images, as it only processes the pixel data that is actually needed for the operation, for example a preview of a filter only operates on the pixels that are actually visible.

I've loaded up 8GB images before and worked with them in near realtime. It's pretty impressive stuff, and includes an enormous number of filters, and is designed for batch/semi-batch operations.

There's also a guide online for using it for producing infared scan composites which could probably applied to what you want to do.

Re:A Related Question...

[shawnmchorse]

Commercial software, but... it's what I use: Panavue Image Assembler. You'd be using it in "mosaic" mode, which works quite well and is what I use constantly for doing scans of largish items. It does color blending on joins, and is fairly automatic. It can also handle 16-bit color depth TIFF images. I bought it recently, and have no complaints with it.

Re:A Related Question...

[YoungRob]

Take a look at Hugin http://hugin.sourceforge.net/. I use it for panoramas all the time and it is excellent.

How much of the light spectrum?

[dattaway]

So it maps a large area with fine granularity. Its flash so I can't determine if its a RGB or CYMK photo. Or even if it details bands in the infrared spectrum. Or wavelengths in the ultraviolet?

Re:How much of the light spectrum?

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck does that have to do with it being flash. Did you think your screen would suddenly radiate visible infrared at you or something?

Re:How much of the light spectrum?

[theCoder]

The information blub in the article noted that it was 3 bands at 16 bpp (per band). Most likely those bands are RGB. I'd be surprised, though, if they really got 16 full bits of range for each pixel. It's probably something less than that, at least for the red and blue bands, but still more than 8. Maybe 11-12 bits.

I wonder what file format they're storing the image data in. Most file formats can't handle images that big. TIFF has an upper limit of 4G, for example (I've heard of 64 bit TIFF versions, but I've never seen a definite spec for that and I don't think libtiff supports that). Of course, there are many formats that can support images that large, or they could have made their own simple format.

Trust me

[Anonymous Coward]

trust me you do not want to see Kylie with such many details. It would need army of PSpers working on it before. Better talk about Keeley, or Jessica

Wait, is that...

[isnoop]

I think I found a naked lady sunbathing!

Re:Wait, is that...

[Joebert]

nah, someone else noticed that earlier, they zoomed in & as it turns out, it's just Jesus' balls.

Mirror ?

[non-compliant]

Can someone mirror this ?

Re:Mirror ?

[MichaelSmith]

Can someone mirror this ?

Not using conventional hosting solutions, I assume. I wonder if there is an OSS version of it (client and server) floating around?

You HAVE to see these Pictures

[quadszilla]

I went to a display by gigapixel of their photos last year in San Diego. They are absolutely incredible! You might not think that this type of resolution would have any kind of effect, but it's incredible to stand 7 feet away and see more detail than you could if you were looking at the actual scene in real life. Definately go see them if you have get the chance. When I emailed and asked about the price, they ranged in prce from $1900 - $7500 for a print out. The San Diego Panorama, Coronado Island CA, was a 5 panel print out (that was the one that was $7500).

It's like "Powers of Ten"

[joe_n_bloe]

Anyone remember that?

Re:It's like "Powers of Ten"

[lemur3]

yes I remember it, but, I disagree,.. it is nothing like it.

Soon everyone will be able to make one :-)

[rsargent]

The Gigapan device, being developed by CMU and NASA, is a low-cost way to generate 1-40 gigapixel panoramas using off-the-shelf digital cameras. Soon it will be available to the general public. See some panoramas taken with the device or find out more about the commercial version. (Disclaimer: I'm part of the Global Connection project, which is developing the device)

Surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm actually surprised that nobody mentioned goatse this time..

1,145?

[Rik Sweeney]

Man, that'd make for a very boring slideshow round someone's house one night:

"OK, this next slide is Jesus' left eye. We're now only two slides away from the bridge of his nose..."

I remember this one...

[lzandman]

The TNO institute in The Netherlands also created a very large digital panorama photograph about two years ago. It was pretty impressive at the time.

Ouch!

[slightlyunruly]

From the article:

Size on Hard Disk of the 3x16 bit final image: 51,625,586,000 bytes

...this is gonna be one hell of a slashdotting!

Zooming in

[lastberserker]

How they wish now Seadragon were there to help ;-)

Woohoo! I found Waldo!!11one

[Anonymous Coward]

He's in the middle third of the picture!

p.s. It helps to know that Waldo wore a toga in the 16th century. :-)

Jesus + Woman

[aarku]

Is it just me or does Jesus have a woman resting on his lap in the Last Supper section?

Re:Jesus + Woman

[Anonymous Coward]

If you were the son of the Lord, what would you be doing at your last supper?

GP is correct

[deesine]

mostly. I guess that we have to trust that they do in fact have a huge image stored on some drive somewhere. However, odds are that what we are seeing in the Flash viewer app are an array of images each representing a different area and different resolution. In other words, they are serving that photo up the same way GoogleEarth and WorldWind do.

It's a marketing stunt. You too could generate the world's largest digital (or analog, don't know if Landstat images are taken digitally or not) photo by taking a bunch of GE images at a zoomed in depth and stitching them together on your super-fast and beafy setup. It would then be kinda hard to prove you have such an image because, how would you show it to anybody? I don't think Photoshop will open anything that large. Something called Xres(?) used to specialize in large photos, maybe it would. The only way to show that image on the net is to serve it up like GE/WW does, or some similar scheme, whereby you save several different versions of your original photos, each at a different resolution.

Sponsored by Microsoft(R)?

[omeg]

Take a look at the footer: it says the website is optimized for Microsoft(R) Windows(R) & Internet Explorer(R). I've never seen so many (R)s in one sentence that wasn't written by Microsoft! Feel free to burn his bandwidth, I guess...

Biggest.. Picture.. Ever..

[crizpiz]

Wow, I sincerely hope they have an enormous amount of bandwidth because the Slashdot effect on an 8.5 giga-pixel photo would be rediculious.

The fine line

[suv4x4]

Gigapixel writes to point us to what is claimed to be the largest digital photo on the Net, at 8.6 Gigapixel.

Marketing annoyance is crossing a threshold.

Re:The fine line

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, at least they were honest, instead of posting the site AC or as a seemingly unrelated account.

(Yes, I do see the humour in posting an "at least they werent AC" comment as AC.

Downloads? Torrents?

[Computer Guru]

Where can I download this? I can't believe no one's asked... What's /. coming to?! I'll put a mirror up soon as I'm done digitally capturing all segments of the 80GB file with SnagIt 8.1 and saving it as a PNG - no stitching needed. Need seeds!

..anyone knows the music ?

[Anonymous Coward]

does anyone know the music that's playing in the background ?

Re:..anyone knows the music ?

[Artichoke]

Does anyone know why the music is playing? :P

Re:..anyone knows the music ?

[slightlyspacey]

Mozart - Lacrimosa

Re:..anyone knows the music ?

[slightlyspacey]

Yes, I just picked a random post to reply to :) Can't even karma whore correctly. Some days it just doesn't pay to get out of bed.

Re:..anyone knows the music ?

[fbjon]

W.A.Mozart: Lacrimosa

well, go ahead and tell us...

[misanthrope101]

you are treated to a sudden and rather unpleasant close-up of Jesus's crotch. On the cross.

Well, was He risen? I keep hearing yes, but I've always been too shy to check.

Re:well, go ahead and tell us...

[Stealth Potato]

If the fundies are right and there's a Hell, you're going there for sure, and I'm going right along with you for laughing.

...It was worth it.

Re:well, go ahead and tell us...

[Fred_A]

Some church people have been checking but so far they aren't saying... ;)

So....

[Anonymous Coward]

Where's Waldo?

  - ac

Principle of VLA systems:

[Sir Unimaginative]

A lot of small receivers pointed at the same thing behave similarly to how a much larger hypothetical single receiver could be expected to in the same situation.

Expect multi-lens and/or multi-sensor digital cameras to become more common than they are now. Don't expect them to be portable in any sense but the most loosely technically adherent, or consumer-affordable for a couple generations after that, but still.

39 Megapixels...

[rHBa]

http://www.hasselblad.com/products/h-system/h3d.as px

Re:39 Megapixels...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.hasselblad.com/products/h-system/h3d. as px

You realize he was talking about 35 mm sensor the whole time? The Hasselblad (or Phase One digital backs for that matter) have sensors that are 2x a 35 mm sensor. 35 mm equivalent film resolution is enough for most (not all) professionals... just look at what kind of camera they're lugging around.

Re:39 Megapixels...

[rHBa]

He might well have been but the original post he was replying to was talking about "consumer cameras" in 20-30 years. Who says they have to be 35mm?

Re:39 Megapixels...

[jedrek]

I'm guessing based on the consumer cameras sold over the past 40 years - they've gone down in size, not up.

Italian!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's an Italian work!
yeahhh! :)

---
Saluti a tutti i lettori Italiani di \.
(ed anche a quelli che riescono a leggere questo post ;) )
ogni tanto anche noi ci facciamo sentire, meno male va,
non siamo poi così da buttare...

bye from Italy!
=NiL=

What's the problem?

[CarpetShark]

Huh? What's the problem? 640k of memory should be enough for that... or anyone, actually! ;)

Someone please mod this up

[Flying pig]

If a significant part of the major art of Italy was put on the Net like this, it would be painfully apparent just how empty and devoid of meaning are most of the cultural productions of the 20th (and 21st so far) Centuries.

Godi, Fiorenza, poi che se' sì grande,
che per mare e per terra batti l'ali...

Biggest single image I could find: 450 Megapixels

[lhaeh]

Here is an image of earth at night courtesy of NASA, only 5.9 MiB. Really cool to zoom in on, you can make out lots of stuff. I wouldn't recommend clicking this link unless you have a ton of ram. Best to save and view in photoshop.

Woohoo!

[DuranDuran]

This will look great on my MySpace page!!!!!!!!!1

Huh

[wolf369T]

Could some one please torrent it?

Google Maps - a very gross approximation: 2Tpx

[Animaether]

just 'cos I'm bored...

Google Earth uses the same maps as Google Maps, afaik. Google Maps does not have the highest resolution pictures for every spot on Earth; not even domestic US, but certainly not the oceans.

But let's say it did.

As far zoomed in as I can go, right at the equator, the little distance bar tells me 20 meters for 69 pixels. Obviously there's going to be a good bit of error in there, so when we take the circumference of the Earth, let's ignore ellipticity and any significance and call it 40,000 kilometers.

40,000,000 / 20 = 2,000,000 pixels.

A lat/long image only needs a 2:1 aspect ratio (360 degrees around, 180 degree up/down). Let's ignore that you don't need 2,000,000 pixels near the poles to get the same effective resolution as at the equator (but would be the only way to get them stitched together into a regular flat rectangle bitmap), and we get...

2,000,000px * 1,000,000px = 2,000,000,000,000px

So Google Maps, if it actually -had- the highest detail everywhere, when all stitched together, would be roughly a 2 -tera- pixel image.

If anybody's more bored (or happens to find a statement from Google, I suppose), a more accurate number will surely be provided ;)

300mpx image

[Anonymous Coward]

Theres a 300million pixel image on the same site. Is that pot growing on someones balcony?

Re:Biggest single image I could find: 450 Megapixe

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever stopped to think how it would be possible to take a picture with the whole earth at night? Yup... I didn't think so.

one could argue

[Anonymous Coward]

that something like the skin of google earth is a FAR larger image. I have worked with satellite imagery over 100gb, but the GE skin is in the petabytes as a single large flat-file image.

not same as Gigapxl project

[roror]

This is different from the Gigapxl () project. Gigapxl project headed by Graham Flint, a semi retired physicist, takes single snapshots that has information equivalent to 4 Gigapxl each. Check their website for tech details and a lot of images of places in america. Shortly, their technology consists of shooting with large format film camera (9"x18" negatives) followed by high resolution scanning. Details of their methods are fascinating.

And ya, let me not forget, Michael T. Jones, a co-founder and chief technology officer of Keyhole, now Google Earth, is another team member in the project.

Largest Human Ejaculation

[Plutonite]

In similar efforts, and upon realizing that semen + semen = semen, a regular spermbank donor has announced he has made the world's biggest spermjar, this being achieved in six month's worth of ejaculations. The results are quite stunning, as enough fluid has been generated to fill a small fish tank.

The donor has annuonced he will put the fluid in the shape of a single large squirt, thereby creating the world's largest ejaculation.

Awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

Who would want to see a very large image of a single pixle camera?

Fab!

[Rob T Firefly]

I can't wait to get home and add some crudely drawn moustaches and Pam Anderson boobs to what will surely be the world's biggest photoshop.

there is a minority

[Anonymous Coward]

*in an Indiana Jones voice

Flash...Why did it have to be flash?

Grow up kids, this ain't your Daddy's web now...

Umm, where are the ACTUAL details of the camera??

[zaqattack911]

It's all nice and dandy that they used 4 x AMD Opteron(TM) 885 Dual Core 64 bit , with 1.8 TB of space to "Compute"? (heh) this image.

But where are the REAL details?

I.E. what camera, what lens, what settings, what lighting, what software did they use to stitch?

You know.. details that are interesting, not how much ram they used :)

Starting with your measurement

[benhocking]

If I start with 20 meters = 69 pixels, then 1 km = 1450 pixels, or 1 km^2 = 2.1 Mpx. Ignoring the oceans (since they no doubt have far worse resolution), the Earth has a land area of > 148 million km^2. That comes out to about 148 M * 2.1 M px = 310 Tpx. If the ocean were at a similar resolution, it'd be about 1 petapixel.

Re:Starting with your measurement

[Animaether]

whoops - totally forgot by divide by 69 >_

0 for 2

[benhocking]

(A) The Brits have spelled it "spelt" for a long time, whereas we Americans have spelt it "spelled" for just as long. (B) See this site. Evidently, it's Greek and Latin.

Good thing about PS - MOASD

[Nom du Keyboard]

Good thing PhotoShop broke its 30,000 x 30,000 barrier a while back. Can't wait to try this on my Pentium-II.

Of course, dowloading this image will be the MOASD (Mother of all SlashDotting).

Email it to me please

[water-and-sewer]

I don't have time to read TFA. Can someone just copy the image and send it to me by email?

Because that's what everyone else does to me. Jeez, one friend sent me an "update" with over 10MB of photos in it to me today.

Not much to see

[Brett Johnson]

The site takes forever to load (understandable Flash + Slashdot effect). However, the Flash view is not resizable, so I cannot get a larger view of the painting, only a small window through which to view a fragment of the fresco. I have a 30-inch Cinema HD display. I want to fill that display with the image. Even though there is a "Full Screen" link on the page, it only opens a full screen browser window, with the small flash view in the upper left corner, occupying 10% of the window.

Incorrect? Gigapan project at 30?

[awtbfb]

The Gigapan material says it can reach 30 gigapixels with the right camera. The preview images don't say what their resolutions are, but they are clearly pretty big.

I wasn't impressed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Two problems with this. First off, I was under the impression that a single image was taken, but thats not really a big deal, I mean, articles are often given misleading titles to draw in attention.
Secondly, the delivery method was terrible. I hate flash, and I don't exactly believe that it should be presenting this image...
I'd rather open the image in a browser window and just scroll around.
I AM impressed by the size and the amount of work done on this. I just wish it was more of an "experience". I basically closed that page in a huff, because of poor implementation.

Nah - Google maps must take the prize.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a trecherous area for record setting.

Is it one single image or a bunch of images pasted together? If it's the latter then Google Maps (with pixels as small as 10cm in some areas of the world) surely gets the prize for by FAR the largest digital photograph on the net.

When you take a photo in little chunks and pull them off the server in little chunks does it REALLY count?

Digital photography on par with 19th century

[Anonymous Coward]

"common" wet process negative do over 100 megapixels http://sechtl-vosecek.ucw.cz/images/zoom.jpg when scanned on flatbed scanner (this one is about 8cm big, scanned 2400DPI) allowing one to read headlines in the shop on the other side of square. The photo was taken by Ignac Sechtl http://sechtl-vosecek.ucw.cz/ in 1876. There are 50x60cm collodion negatives out there, how much megapixel one can squeeze out of those?

Once I will not be affraid of explosives, I will try to reproduce this technique http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_Collodion_Process myself ;)

National Archives of Japan

[falconx7]

I guess I don't see this as being too impressive as it's not a huge leap beyond what's already out there. The National Archives of Japan has a digital collection online that is pretty impressive. I guess many of the images aren't quite as big, but there's quite a few ranging from 1-2 billion pixels.

http://www.digital.archives.go.jp/index_e.html

One scroll I looked at was 7,164x279,984 pixels = 2,005,805,376 pixels, about 1/4th the size of this image. Was one other scroll that was slightly less wide. They're all shown through JPIP and an activex viewer, which unfortunately means IE only. Or you can do like I do and pull out the jpip url from the html and use it with a jpeg2k viewer capable of jpip.

!= 24-bit

[r_jensen11]

Weak, it's only 16-bit. In other words:

Nothing to see here, move along

Re:!= 24-bit

[triso]

Weak, it's only 16-bit. In other words:

Nothing to see here, move along

It is 16-bits per channel, so with 3 channels, R, G and B, it is 48-bits per pixel.

Re:!= 24-bit

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's actually 48 bit -- that's 16 bits per channel, three channels. "Regular" 24 bit images are 8 bits per channel.

re:The Largest Digital Photo

[JohnVanVliet]

And i though that my 64k x 32k.png map of Venus ( for Celestia ) was big