People Watching, with Gigapxls(tm)

So, you own a 3, 4 or even 5 megapixel camera. Sure! It's pretty good. Crisp images. Fast processing. Sweet! Now check out this site and prepare to be amazed. (pictures may take a while on dial-up) These shots are from a Gigapxl camera. It weighs 100 pounds (45kgs). The little tiny dots that you see in the full size image can be zoomed so far in that you can see what they are actually doing. Let's put this in perspective. A 1 Megapixel picture (1,000,000 pixels) needs to be just 8 square inches (51 square centimetres. About 7cm x 7cm) to convey all of the information that the human eye can see. A 1000 Megapixel picture (1,000,000,000 pixels) would need to be 50 square feet in size (4.65 square metres). This is about 2.15m high x 2.15m wide to display the same information that the eye can see in the 1 Megapixel shot. They have already developed a 4 Gigapxl camera. A 4" x 6" picture that you see now (a standard photo with a 3 Megapixel camera) would be 3m by 6m in size to see the same detail. Bloody hell!

Posted by Mick @ 2/08/2005 04:13:00 pm