Medical imaging specialists Aperio have broken the 4GB file size limit on the TIFF image format by creating their own format called BigTIFF and offering the format into the public domain (an amazing fact in its own right). To showcase the power of BigTIFF image resolution, Aperio has released the first terapixel image. The image shows 225 pathology slides of breast tissue and can be viewed and explored online (it looks surprisingly like a pink version of Google Earth once you start zooming in).

The image's actual file size as a compressed BigTIFF is 143GB, so don't expect to be shooting terapixel photos on your digital camera anytime soon. To make this kind of resolution useful, Aperio had to use a high-power oil immersion ScanScope slide-scanning system to get the necessary detail.

http://crave.cnet.com/8301-1_105-9717046-1.html

I can't say I'm particularly enamoured with the composition. I mean, I don't think I would want to frame this and hang it on my wall .

By the way, I believe Photoshop's new PSB large document format can handle up to 300,000 pixels square. If my maths is correct, that's a 90 Gb image (3 bytes for each pixel).