For this camera, miniaturization is not the idea

“The world’s largest film camera” was unveiled Wednesday evening on the plaza east of the old Chicago Daily News building. It will be on display through Oct. 31 at 2 North Riverside Plaza.

The camera can capture an image with so much resolution that it can be enlarged to four stories tall and still be sharper than anything you can take with a digital camera. Traveling on its own custom-built trailer, it will be used to document America’s vanishing cultures. The exhibit is called Buffalo & Butterflies: Tales of American Culture.

It was appropriate that it was outside an old newspaper building, where the photo staff used to maintain its own flock of homing pigeons to rush film from events across the city to the newspaper’s headquarters. But it would take a lot of pigeons for this film – it’s 53 inches across.

Maybe if they were African swallows …