Someone built it, with a custom-designed lens (don’t recall the focal length) and a vacuum plate to hold the film flat. One seemingly-odd feature: one lens element was just a flat piece of glass, planar on both sides. Think the angle of view was 90 degrees or maybe more, but not way more, so focal length somewhere around 200 mm.
The guy might have used the term Gigapixel – don’t recall if he was just taking the film pic in order to scan it.
Any pics or links? Though I am not a camera buff per se, I find that very interesting because I’ve never heard of it.
@Spiderman is a camera buff; he might have a clue.
I found a 2006 article about one Graham Flint who had designed a camera called the “Gigapixl.”
“The film is 10 inches wide and comes in 250-foot long rolls. He cuts them into 125-foot pieces for each magazine, which gives him about 75 shots each.”
–Sunday Camera, Boulder, CO, September 3, 2006
At the time, there were only four in the world.
It looks like it was a project to produce super-detailed imaging of the US by taking super large negatives and scanning them at the highest resolution possible. Presumably this is because large format film like that can capture extremely fine details due to the way film works. For example, while modern high-end full frame sensors can exceed the resolution of 35mm film (~20 megapixels), medium format film like 120 is still higher resolution (~400 megapixels) than the best sensors (~37 megapixels). An 18x9 sheet of film would have absurd resolution, assuming the optics were up to the task.
I’m guessing the reason we don’t hear about it anymore is that these days, it’s probably easier to just take a colossal number of regular sized images and stitch them together into a larger whole.
Gigapixel Photography by Jeffrey Martin
Meet The Gigapixel Camera: Your 14 Megapixel Digital Camera On Steroids