4K? That's so last year. 8K? Yesterday's news. This timelapse video was shot in an astonishing 10K resolution using an 80 megapixel camera. The level of detail in these gorgeous shots is mind-boggling.


Joe Capra of Scientifantastic shot this video to test out the PhaseOne IQ180 digital medium format still camera. Its 80 megapixel resolution means that each original frame is 10328x7760 pixels. Good lord.

What does all that resolution mean for us humans actually watching the video? Well, since Vimeo only supports regular old 1080p, you can't actually see the shots in their full size and resolution. Even if it supported 10K, there isn't a monitor you could buy that would display it in full. Even if there was, your eyes would be hard-pressed to appreciate it. But you can still get a sense of the vastness of each image when Capra zooms waaaay in on each shot. He explains:

Each shot sequence starts off with the full resolution footage scaled down to fit within a 1920x1080 resolution (14% scale). The next shot in each shot sequence is the full resolution shot scaled to 50%, so basically zooming in quite a bit. From there we go into the full resolution shot scaled to 100%, which is an extreme zoom/crop. As you can see, the quality and detail holds up extremely well, it's pretty amazing.


We agree. Here's a still of the first full shot in the video, followed by the enlarged portion:

I wonder if the future of photography is cameras of such high resolution that you can just zoom in to any tiny area of the frame instead of using telephoto lenses. Makes you think.