Gigapxl Project and Photography

Gigapxl Project is a really cool site. Basically they created a "giga pixel" camera. It's large format (film, of course!), and then they scanned it to make it digital. During my trip to SF last weekend, a photographer in the art show in Union Square was selling medium format pictures, the biggest of which was two-by-three feet in dimension and was selling for $600 framed. Medium formats are around 100GP to 400GP when scanned digitally. Obviously, the 1000GP camera is a large format film camera.

Also, when I was walking to Embarcadero to catch the bus to Pier 39, I passed by a person who was selling framed photographs at the end of Market Street. The pictures where printed off digital SLRs. I asked the person what camera they used and she said they used the 12 Megapixel Fujifilm FinePix S3 Pro, which is a pro-level digital SLR costing around $2000 without lens. The pictures she has were also two-by-three feet, but you can tell it was from a digital camera. The picture was decent when viewed from seven feet away, but a closer look shows that it can't be compared with medium, or even 35mm film. I think 35mm film is equal to a 45MP digital camera. She was selling her pictures for around $150.

I went to Pier 39 to checkout the Wyland Gallery and Rodney Lough Jr. Wilderness Gallery. The Rodney Lough gallery sells landscape pictures of sizes up to 3-by-6 feet in dimensions and costs thousands of dollars. I think they were also taken with medium format film camera.

Ken Rockwell has an article on how to build a 100MP camera system for around $2000. He also argues that medium and large format films are "future-proof" since today's film scanner does not show the maximum possible resolution for these formats. Better scanners will be built in the future. While you're stuck with what your digital camera can take today.

Anyways, going back to the Gigapxl project, below are pictures I stole from their website, clearly, these are copyrighted by them. They have lots of pictures in their Image Gallery, but I chose to steal the Half-Dome picture and post it here. It's amazing how much detail it retains when zoomed-in: