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26 Gigapixel Photo Sets New World Record

FrenchSilk writes "The largest gigapixel photograph ever created with a DSLR camera was made by A.F.B. Media GmbH in Dresden, Germany. 1655 images, each 21.6 megapixels in size, were taken with a Canon 5D Mark II and a 400 mm lens over a period of 176 minutes. The images were stitched on a 16 processor system with 48GB of main memory, taking 94 hours to create the final result. The interactive view can be found here."

4 of 139 comments (clear)

  1. Google Earth by HateBreeder · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If we're gonna stitch photos together, i think Google Earth is probably by far "higher-resolution" than this.

    Show me a SINGLE image sensor that can do 26GP and i'll be impressed!

    --
    Sigs are for the weak.
  2. Actual Largest Photo by OverlordQ · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Legacy Project, they converted an old hanger into a pinhole camera.

    --
    Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
  3. Largest Image Sensor by HenryKoren · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Some related knowledge: The largest Image sensor (that I've heard of) is part of the "Large Synoptic Survey Telescope" in Chile and it weighs in at 3200 Megapixels

    http://www.megapixelmyth.com/?p=127

    Shameless plug: check out my blog at megapixelmyth.com

  4. Re:Is it really impressive to stich a pic together by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Stitching many images to form one big picture is challenging in many ways: First you need the camera and lens to capture enough detail. With a 400mm lens, it took a 21MP camera to get that much data. If you've ever tried to shoot a crisp 21MP picture at 400mm, you know that even just one of these 1655 photos is an achievement. Then you need the hardware to shoot these pictures in quick succession: The photoshoot took them three hours. During that time, the sun moves, shadows move, the color of the sky changes. The faster you can shoot the pictures, the better the result will be. The banding in the picture is a result of "only" shooting one picture every six seconds. You can't shoot to flash memory cards either, because they're going to be full all the time and you don't have the time to change them, so you need a camera which can shoot directly to a computer. Then you have lots of images on your hard disk and you need to stitch and blend them. Off-the-shelf panorama software is optimized for small numbers of pictures, so you have a couple of problems to solve on that front too.

    That said, personally I think that that resolution is too much. Due to the way these images are created, they don't work at all for even moderately dynamic views, they're always full of artifacts from the light change, they usually look quite dull when zoomed out and the interesting bits are lost in a vast desert of pointless detail.