On a cold day in September 2009, from the roof of the building “Haus der Presse”, office of the newspaper publishing company – Sächsische Zeitung in Germany, the World record for the ‘Largest Picture in the World’ was made. With a resolution of 2,97,500 x 87,500 pixels (26 Gigapixel), the picture was made with a Canon 5D Mark-II Camera with a 400mm-lens. The picture consists of 1,665 full format pictures with 21.4 megapixel resolution. This 102 GB of raw data was recorded by a photo-robot directly to a notebook computer in about 172 minutes.
The Canon 5D Mark-II Camera was used on a Rodeon engine head produced by the company – Dr. Clauss. With its accurate calibration of 72,000 possible steps in a complete 360 degree twisting, the engine head was the best choice for this world record. By the optics the 5.6/400mm of Canon were used. The whole system weighed about 8kg and was installed on a wooden stand on the roof of the building.
A special computer was custom built for achieving this feat. It consisted of a dual Xeon processor, 48 GB main memory and 4.5 TB of Hard Drive space. The development of the picture took around 100 Hours. The computer with its 16-core CPU needed 94 hours extra for stitching the pictures to a whole large picture which resulted in a 61 GB large photo data. All in all the picture with 2,97,500 x 97,500 pixel (printing-size of 105 x 35 meters) was the largest known photo in the world! till December 2009. Since then a number of other attempts have dethroned it from the World Record title, nevertheless it still is a feat worth mentioning.
You can view the picture yourself by clicking here.
Other more recent worthy mentions (all with clickable hyperlinks):
- Claimed by: Gerald Donovan
- Dimensions (WxH): 4,72,603px × 94,955px
- Pixels: 44,876,017,865 (45 Gigapixels)
- Photographed: 23-April-2010
- General Availability: 2-May-2010
- Claimed by: Simon Oberli
- Dimensions (WxH): 3,85,163px × 80,500px
- Pixels: 31,005,621,500 (31 Gigapixels)
- Photographed: 13-March-2010
- General Availability: 25-April-2010
- Claimed by: Kolor Autopano / Arnaud Frich / Martin Loyer
- Dimensions (WxH): 3,54,159px × 75,570px
- Pixels: 26,763,795,630 (26 Gigapixels)
- Photographed: September 2009
- General Availability: March 2010
An interesting read but a useless activity. Whats the use of such a thing / record which no one can view on a Personal Computer. Better, If the same was used for a more constructive activity like Astrophotography or for mapping a field.
Well Kulashekhar, it seems you didn’t actually click on any of the links to see the different pictures that are there when you mentioned “Whats the use of such a thing / record which no one can view on a Personal Computer.”
You really need to see the Paris 26 Gigapixels site. It is simply amazing and I am sure you’ll get your answers.