Rob Beschizza
Gear

8,600 Megapixel Photo of Renaissance Fresco

HAL9000 and The Inventory Office at the Department of Cultural Property in Novara, Italy, might be the most inscrutably-named euro-tech outlet of the week, but they do have what they claim is the world’s largest web-based digital photo, at 8600 Megapixels. Yep, 8.6 jiggapixels. The shot archives the Parete Gaudenziana, a Gaudenzio Ferrari fresco dating […]

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HAL9000 and The Inventory Office at the Department of Cultural Property in Novara, Italy, might be the most inscrutably-named euro-tech outlet of the week, but they do have what they claim is the world's largest web-based digital photo, at 8600 Megapixels. Yep, 8.6 jiggapixels.

The shot archives the Parete Gaudenziana, a Gaudenzio Ferrari fresco dating to 1513 in the
Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, in the convent of Varallo Sesia.

"The image stands at the boundaries of the modern opportunities as for the final dimensions of the digital picture. The picture has been created (by) joining electronically 1145 images, each 12.2 Megapixel and 16 bit per color channel."

The stitch job adds up to 84GB (suffice to say, the site uses a flash-based dynamic loader: that would be one hell of a JPEG) with an 97,000x89,000 pixel resolution. In essence, a 30 sq. ft. image is resolved to 227 dpi: the machine required to process it had 16GB of RAM, four Opterons and 1.8TB of disk space.

HAL9000 [haltadefinizione.deagostini.it]