New Largest Photo is 26 Gigapixels of Dresden, Germany
New Largest Photo is 26 Gigapixels of Dresden, Germany
Posted 12/18/2009 at 2:51pm
| by Bart Salisbury
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I can see why someone would want to do this. After all, people compete to see how many cockroaches can be eaten in a sitting (36 by Ken Edwards, Great Britain), books can be typed backward (67 by Michele Santelia, Italy), and the shortest time to pluck a turkey (90 seconds by Vincent Pilkington, Ireland). What I don’t understand is why Dresden? There’s probably a less interesting place on the planet, but I’m hard pressed at the moment to imagine where it might be. Still, there’s now a 26 gigapixel image of Dresden in all its glory, and it now stands as the world’s largest.
The picture was manufactured by A.F.B. media GmbH. It was taken with a Canon 5D Mark II camera with a 400mm lens. It is comprised of 1,665 full format, 21.4 megapixel images. Using a robot atop the Haus der Presse building, all the snapshots that make up the final image were captured in 3 hours, 52 minutes. Another 94 hours were needed to stitch together the 102 GB of raw data, using a computer with 48 GB of memory and 16 CPUs.
The completed image is 297,500 pixels by 97,500 pixels. To view the complete image would take the equivalent of 13,558 1600x1200 monitors. And at 26 gigapixels, this image of Dresden is 1.5 times larger than the previous record holder, a 17.2 gigapixel image of Yosemite National Park.
Still, for all the niftiness in this technological feat, couldn’t it have been someplace other than Dresden?
Image Credit: A.F.B. media GmbH
More like this
Trooper_One
December 21, 2009 at 12:36pm
Lush greens, renaissance buildings, it's a beautiful city!
Where would you rather have it at? A McDonad's in some scummy part of Chicago?
arkweld
December 21, 2009 at 4:15am
they are basically stitching together images from a regular camera. With enough time anyone can make something equivalent or larger.
More impressive is the Gigapxl Project, which actually has specially designed camera capable of taking 4 gigapixel photos as single frames.
Mista_T
December 20, 2009 at 6:41pm
Film quality is still better. A film camera can capture infinite quality images, instantly. No glitches either. Burn.
Josh Rosberg
December 18, 2009 at 10:18pm
If you look on the right side over the black roofed building across the street there is a guy with a red bookbag next to a phonebooth. if you look to the left of that he's there again next to a van. anyone else spot some problems stiching all the pictures together caused.
rseding91
December 19, 2009 at 6:53pm
If you look at the various clocks they are all a little different from each other.
Also a huge one I just found - if you click the "people" link then once it zooms in if you pan up/left a little the bridge with the cars/busses on it.
It shows 4 cars and 2 busses. But if you look at them there are realy only 2 cars a and 1 bus. the other 2 cars and 1 bus are repeats.
GoldenMonkey
December 18, 2009 at 9:57pm
The buildings in the photo looks curved like looking through the viewing glass on the other side of a door.
vistageek
December 18, 2009 at 5:40pm
It won't let me zoom farther than 15%...lame. I wanna dl the full image.
cschwab
December 18, 2009 at 4:46pm
I spent some time looking at the picture and it's pretty amazing. You can zoom in on buildings and objects miles away with great qualtiy.
dugn
December 18, 2009 at 4:28pm
Hmmm. Perhaps they picked Dresden since it's where their main office (A.F.B. media GmbH) is located and a budding technological area since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
As another showpiece of technology, the city of Dresden worked with I.B.M. GmbH to reassemble pieces of the Frauenkirche (church) destroyed during WW II. One of the guiding precepts for reassembly was to use as many of the original pieces as possible from the rubble lying about. They accomplished this by using computers to reverse model each piece, where it likely landed during the bombing and put alll of the pieces together in probably one of the most complex real-life jigsaw puzzles ever.
fry
December 18, 2009 at 4:48pm
Good question.
Less beautiful than it was before the war, but still a beautiful city. Perhaps the author would have preferred a picture of downtown Detroit.
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