Digital holography replaces the permanent recording material of analog holography with an electronic light sensitive matrix detector, but besides the many unique advantages, this brings serious limitations with it as well. The limited resolution of matrix detectors restricts the field of view, and their limited size restricts the resolution in the reconstructed holographic image. Scanning the larger aerial hologram (the interference light field of the object and reference waves in the hologram plane) with the small matrix detector or using magnification for the coarse matrix detector at the readout of the fine-structured aerial hologram, these are straightforward solutions but have been exploited only partially until now. We have systematically applied both of these approaches and have driven them to their present extremes, over half a magnitude in extensions. © 2009 Optical Society of America.