Gigapixel Project

If you are reading this text on a 1280x1024 computer monitor, a one-gigapixel image would be 35 of your screens wide and 22 screens tall. A four-gigapixel image is twice as wide and twice as high—that is, 70 screens wide and 44 screens tall. I'm sharing this info because a group in the US are using a 4 Gigapixel camera....the sort of resolution used in spy satellites in space. This is a film camera...since digital resolution on a chip hasn't got that far yet. When printed at the highest resolution discernable by the human eye, these images range from 5×10 feet up to 10×20 feet in size. Compared to leading 6-megapixel digital cameras, a Gigapxl™ image has between 160 and 666 times the number of pixels. Image collection during 2005 has remained at a brisk pace; bringing the total number to around 1,200. Naturally, only a portion of these will make it to the Gigapxl™ Project web site. Nevertheless, compared to the small number of images currently displayed in the Gallery, this represents an enormous backlog. Fortunately, during the next several months, they anticipate a substantial increase in the rate at which images are processed and prepared for display both in the Gallery and elsewhere. This, in turn, will put the group some way on toward satisfying a further objective of the Gigapxl Project; namely making the Portrait of America available to the widest possible audience. My favourite is the picture of Angel's Window in the Grand Canyon. The canyon drops some 5,000 feet down to the Colorado river....seen it once on a plane trip, but not in this kind of detail.