Getting a massive image to plaster on a building

Saw Nicoles post Bilboards for Business and Marketing and the image with Huge billboard in the US inspired my to think big. So I have been looking for Technology that is going to be able to reproduce a sharp image on a wall of a building. No a small building, a big one. This is called building wrapping which is depicted in the image above at Kelvin Grove Uni, but I am thining even grander in size. Producing this type of image will require Large format photography to be employed. It appears the best way to achieve this is by using a Large format camera but not using film or the Hasselblat 45 digital camera. The technology that I have discovered blitzes this type of image production. It uses technology developed by Better Light.

Better Light is totally different from the single-shot digital capture cameras using area array sensors (CCD and CMOS). They use scan backs which gather the information for the image in one continuous scan as the light is collected by three, individually filtered rows of pixels – this is called a tri-linear CCD. Since it moves across the “film plane” capturing light one row of pixels at a time, it will take several minutes to complete a large file. On the other hand, no other camera is gathering such a huge population of pixels (144 Megapixels or MORE) over such a large format area of nearly 3”x4”—that’s 5X the physical area of most array sensors! And, all of the pixels are PURE, true RGB color, not interpolated color by the camera software.

So forget the hasselblad or phase one this appears to be the best option for creating an image with sufficient file size to be reprinted on the side of a building in monstrous proportion.

What do we need?

Well the unit is a scanner which fits snugly into the film slide area of a large format view camera. View cameras are old technology and reasonably cheap. Associated lenses are also used. A laptop is required to store the data. As a scan can take 100 seconds + a strudy tripod is also required. But what is the cost I hear you ask, well a bit but not as much as you might expect compared to the Hasselblad at $45,000. If we are going to get anything it may as well be the biggest and the best so the Super 10K-HS™ has an image size of 10200 x 13600px resulting in an image of 794 MB and costs $22,995 USD. But there are smaller versions of startig at $6495 USD and still have some fairly impressive specs.

Still not convinced. Check out the image at Zoomify and check out the resolution of this image. Look for the people on the other side of the lake swimming at the beach in the far right corner, you will be amazed.

Let me know your thoughts.