image viewer for gigapixels

[Ryuji Suzuki <rs@silvergrain.org>]

Hello,

Sorry, this has nothing to do with traditional photography,
but rather handling of high quality scanned images.

I have dozens of images in the range of 0.5 to 2 gigapixels
range. All I want to do is to view the images, and switch
between 1:1, 1:2, 1:4, ..., 1:32 magnification, and navigate
within the image. I am perfectly fine with pre-making all
preview sizes.

Preview in Leopard works very poorly, and most other programs
do not work at all... Photoshop works poorly, but that's an
overkill for the purpose. Lightroom 2 hangs up with the small
catalog containing a dozen gigapixel images.

Is there a good tool fur such purpose?

Thanks,

Ryuji