I uploaded three pictures now to GigaPan.

This is the 71 Megapixel panorama which is also on Flickr:
http://www.gigapan.org/gigapans/39811/

This is the 220 Megapixel indoor test:
http://www.gigapan.org/gigapans/39806/

And finally a full resolution picture (280 Megapixel) which I didn’t upload to Flickr. I managed to screw up color balance, gamma, brightness, just everything while scanning, so it looks very bad. Nevertheless it does show what kind of sharpness might be possible with this pile of junk, given the right conditions. The picture has lots of small details, some look really sharp, some are distorted due to movements of the tree branches.
http://www.gigapan.org/gigapans/39814/

When I started to build this thing it was clear that the resulting images could be that huge, but the question is if the optical and mechanical properties are good enough to justify this high resolution.

Is there still the need for sharing the original jpg-Files? I have only a kinda bitchy DSL connection with low upload bandwidth and a modem which likes to crash and disconnect regularly. That’s not the best basis to set up a torrent, I guess. Apart from that I haven’t really used Bittorrent so far.

If there is interest for the source of the bigger images I can upload them as zip-file to some popup-advertising-hell of filehoster and then you can torrent that as much as you want :-)

@drew
I would like to take lots of pictures with this device, but it’s extremely unpractical.
I need the right weather: no rain, no wind, no clouds which could vary the brightness during the 20 minutes a full resolution picture takes.
I have to find a place with low chance of people, animals or whatever running, riding or driving through the image. Even a sleeping animal would look distorted because of small body movements.
Nothing in the picture should reflect the sunlight because the sensor does not like that at all.
There is nothing like autofocus or even auto white balance. To get perfect colors I would need to start taking pictures of a gray card and fine-tune the controls before taking the final picture.
I have to get the large “camera”, a laptop and other stuff to the point of interest in the middle of nowhere. I usually put it in a bicycle trailer.
It’s winter now and I freeze my butt off outside and it’s always too dark.
And, unfortunately, I don’t have Monument Valley next door ;-)

This is why haven’t taken more pictures so far. If you want to build your own scanner camera, do it in summer :-)

Very nice, I see a bit of banding in the sky and remember this is one of the big problems to overcome with a homebrew scanning back. This one is much cleaner than the others I have seen, exciting when you consider the cost of a BetterLight back!

FWIW though, I still don’t see as much detail as I would expect out of large format film, or even a medium format panoramic camera. I wonder if this is because of the lens, or alignment, or scan resolution, but there is significantly less detail than a quality scan of well shot 6×17 film would show at the same image size. This is going by the gigabit version. Still exciting and good work.