Loaded BitmapData objects have historically been limited to 8,191 total pixels along any side with a total supported resolution of 16,777,215 pixels…which isn’t a whole lot when dealing with high resolution images. With the megapixel count of consumer digital cameras breaking well past 10, the need for greater resolution is easily apparent. With Flash Player 11, these restrictions have been lifted, making this is a feature that can be leveraged through a multitude of project types.

Figure 2-1. High-resolution bitmap

We don’t actually need to do anything to enable support for this behavior, as it is built into Flash Player itself. In the following example, we’ll use the Loader class to bring a high-resolution image into a Flash project: