Wednesday, February 09, 2005

GIGAPXL Follow Up



A Follow up to yesterdays post about the Gigapxl camera over on wired.

Immediately after processing, each 9" x 18" exposure is digitally scanned then archived in a temperature and humidity controlled environment. All processing and printing are performed on the resulting one to four gigapixel digital scan. Therefore, the tangible output of the camera—and all that we ever see and work with—is a digital image at one to four billion pixels in size.

Incidentally, a four billion pixel, uncompressed, 16-bit per component image is a 24 gigabyte data file. Moving, copying, editing, processing, and printing files of this scale strains the boundaries of even the most robust image processing tools. Having accomplished such tasks for more than one hundred images certainly makes us feel that we are digital photographers even though we use film in the camera.

The official web site goes into a lot more detail about the process and has a lot more photographs for you to look at.

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