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Monday, June 6, 2011

How many possible 24bit 10Mp photos there can be?

This tweet came from Neil Creek and a simple tweet response was not going to be enough.
His original thought was 16777216 colours x 10 million pixels which is not enough. This number, whilst big, would only represent each pixel being changed through each colour, whilst the rest of the image stayed the same. This would be very boring.


What you need to calculate is 2^24 * 2^24 * 2^24 ... 10 million times. (2^24^10000000)
Since my computer has been sitting here for 10-15 minutes trying to calculate this value and I have been unable to find out how to simplify this sort of equation, we'll just have to make the question easier.


If there were 10,000,000 colours and we still work with 10 million pixels we end up with a number that starts with 1 and has 70 million 0's after it.
That's 1e70million.
Distance from earth to the sun is 1.5e8km
Distance from Earth to Alpha Centauri is 4e13km
Estimated distance across the universe is 1.5e24km


The reason I wanted to make a post out of this is imagine the sort of images that would be produced.

  • Works of Shakespeare
  • A picture of you looking at this large set of images
  • You could be arrested for looking at child pornography
  • You would eventually see the winning tattslotto numbers for the coming weekend
  • You would see an image of how you die
Not that it matters. If you looked at 14 of this pictures a second, you would only see 1.2 million a day.

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