We’re not sure where this gigapixel madness is going to end, but we are rather enjoying seeing the incredible results of this latest record breaker, in the shape of a mahoosive panorama from Budapest.
It’s a record breaker
Firmly trumping the 45 gigapixel image of Dubai taken in May is this ginormous 71 gigapixel monster created by a group of young Hungarians.
Their record breaking efforts were given a helping hand by publicity-seeking industry big cheeses Epson, Microsoft and Sony, and together they have created the world’s highest-resolution 360° panoramic photograph.
Over half a million pixels wide
Shot from a century old observation tower stuck on the highest point around Budapest, the stitched panorama measures up at a colossal 590,000 pixels wide by nearly 121,000 pixels tall.
To bag the component images as quickly as possible, the photographs were taken on a pair of Sony A900 bodies, fitted with a Minolta AF 400mm f/4.5 APO G lens and 1.4x teleconverter.
A custom designed, clever-clogs robotic head was employed to capture the images in sequence, a process that still took over three hours to complete.
The high end Autopano Giga software was fired up to do the stitching on a Dell Precision T7500 Workstation with 2 quad-core Intel Xeon processors, 24 gigabytes of RAM and 6 terabytes of storage capacity.
Stitch it up
Even with such a beefy PC at the helm, stitching the whole thing together took two full days and resulted in a hefty 200GB KRO file.
This had to be converted into PPM format and split into three parts for retouching in Photoshop, with the finished result viewable on the 70 Billion Pixels – Budapest website.
So long as you have the latest version of Silverlight installed, you can enjoy some quite breathtaking levels of zoom (the two images above are of the two extremeties of zoom).
