We've seen our share of panoramas in the past, and even one of the planet's largest was taken in Spain, but those are usually personal projects. What we have here belongs to a new advertising campaign promoting the Bentley Mulsanne, a car that costs about $330,000. Where is the car? Well, let's just say you'll need to do a bit of zooming to find it, as the image size reaches about 53 gigapixels.
Monte Blanco, London, Calblanque, the Moon, Kuala Lumpur… panoramas keep adding gigapixels like candy, and we don't see a ceiling for this trend. The projects get longer and require more advanced technology, but the results are so good that they justify almost everything. That brings us to one of the most obvious facts in advertising: First impressions count. It must be striking, or mysterious enough to capture the attention of the potential consumer… and the folks at Bentley believe they've achieved a bit of both with this 53-gigapixel panorama.
The Bentley Mulsanne and the making of the image
What does a luxury car company have to do with a bridge? Not much, but the story changes completely when we start to zoom, and zoom, and then a bit more. The product in question is the Bentley Mulsanne, a beautiful luxury vehicle with a monstrous twin-turbo V8 of 6.75 liters and an eight-speed automatic transmission. If you want one, the magic number is $330,000, plus some extra bills depending on taxes and availability. Returning to the image, the cameraman combined a total of seventy images (?), using the same technology that NASA developed to create the panoramas of Mars sent by Curiosity.
A claim that doesn't quite measure up
Now... the folks at Bentley got a bit carried away by the heat of promotion and said that if this image were printed, it would be as big as an American football stadium. The problem with that statement is that printed images depend on the final resolution, and at a logical 300 pixels per inch, the "American football stadium" is much smaller. We should also add that you can only zoom in, no lateral movement. In short: The image accomplishes its goal, but you have to take it with a grain of salt..
