The photo below is a view from Bryce Point in Bryce
Canyon National Park in Utah. Nice, huh?
But we haven't shown you the photo just because of its scenic
beauty. This image is believed to be the largest digital photograph ever. If SILICON CHIP pages were five metres wide, this image could be printed at high resolution!
The original contains 40,784 x 26,800 pixels - 1,093,011,200
pixels in total, or a little more than one gigapixel.
Now you might think that it would be a rather impressive
digital camera to take such a photo - and you'd be half right. In fact, such a camera hasn't yet been invented. This image actually consists of 196 separate photographs shot with a garden-variety Canon D1, then stitched together into one seamless composite.
I have been unable to find any record of a higher resolution
photographic (ie non-scientific) digital image that has been created without resizing a smaller, lower resolution image or using an interpolated image.
Here's another way to think about it. Given that the resolving
power of the human eye (under ideal conditions at the centre of the retina) is about one arcminute (1/60th of one degree). This image captures considerably more detail than I (or any other normal sighted human) was able to see with my eye when standing on the overlook at Bryce Point. Assuming one pixel per
arcminute, an image with dimensions of 3780 x 2485 would suffice to capture the amount of detail that the naked eye could resolve. This image has more than 100 times this detail. Looking at the full sized digital image, one is able to see things that might have been difficult or impossible to spot, even when using
binoculars.
At the bottom of the article are some crops to simulate the amount of detail that
would be captured using cameras of different resolutions (I don't own any of
these higher resolution cameras, so the crops below are simulated. Due to the
resizing algorithm used to create these crops, they may over-estimate the amount
of detail actually captured by these cameras).
