God’s Camera

As an amateur photographer (yeah, have a look here), the human eye always fascinates me. It is probably the best “camera” that one can ever possess, but can we quantify? Today’s question deals with the human eye:

Can We Compare the Human Eye to a Camera?

According to photographer and scientist Dr. Roger Clark, the resolution of the human eye is about 576 megapixels. The number seems pretty huge compared to the puny cameras we have around us. But is it really fair to compare a mechanical device to an organic human part?

A 576 MP resolution means that in order to create a screen with a picture so sharp and clear that you can’t distinguish the individual pixels, you would have to pack 576 million pixels into an area the size of your field of view. To get to this number, Clark assumed optimal visual acuity across the field of view; that is, it assumes that your eye is moving around the scene in front of you. He assumes eyes are more like video cameras instead of a snapshot camera clicking individual pictures. If the eye is thought of as a snapshot camera, the resolution drops to about 5-15 megapixels.
That’s because human eyes have lots of flaws that we can’t accept in modern cameras. The eye has a very high resolution at a very small area in the center of vision, called the fovea. We also have a blind spot where our optic nerve meets the retina. Our eyes move around in a scene not only to take in more information, but also to correct for all these imperfections in our visual system.

Really, though, the eye is not a simple camera taking snapshots and saving them into your memory. Our eyes are more like detectives; scanning your surroundings for clues and sending the information to your brain to decipher the full picture. There’s certainly a ceiling above which our eyes will no longer be able to distinguish between pixels. But when it comes to our daily visual experience, it is far too simple to compare our eyes to a modern camera.