Gigapixels

ABC News blogs about the Gigapxl Project. (One has to wonder if pxl is a small slice of data compression for such large amounts of data.)

There is no gigapixel camera. Instead they use film with a 210mm lens and then scan the photos.

"Flint said he's doing it for the future. He hopes to take pictures of many of the world's 788 most treasured places as listed by UNESCO.

"Someday, inevitably, he says, many of them will be gone, and he'd like to record them now in the kind of detail that might be useful for virtual-reality technologies that do not exist yet."

"He says he wants to create a visual record, 'so that our grandchildren will be able to see North America exactly as it was at the turn of the century, in incredible detail.'"

Here's my question: how far into the 21st Century will we be when we have digital cameras that can take four gigapixel photographs?