With the help of Epson, Microsoft and Sony, a bunch of Hungarians have created the world's highest-resolution 360 degree panoramic photo to date. The stunning photo was shot from the highest point in Budapest; The stitched panorama is over 590 000 pixel wide and 121 000 pixels tall. To put that into real numbers that mean something to you, at 300DPI (the standard for print), the photo in its entirety would be 156m wide by 31m high. That longer than a bloody football field!
The incredible picture was achieved with 2 Sony A900 bodies with Minolta 400mm f4.5 APO G lenses with a 1.4x teleconverter mounted on a sturdy stand and custom-designed robotic head. Despite the setup, the whole project took over 3 hours to complete and processing on a Dell T7500 with 2 quad-core Xeon processors, 24GB or RAM and 6TB of HD Space, resulted in a 200GB file after 2 full days of processing. Can you imagine how long the photo retouching took?
In all seriousness, Epson could not possibly have printed the WHOLE thing, although it would be a whole new kind of epic, they scaled it down to a 15m wide print from a downsized, 1.5-gigapixel copy, which is sitting pretty at the Erzsébut lookout station in Budapest. PPFFFFT! 1.5-gigapixels ONLY?
See the epic bajillion pixel image for yourself here!
(Source: Photography Blog)