The Resolution of Your Eyes

Have you ever wondered how many megapixels our eyes are capable of? I have, and it turns out that we can see with the astounding detail of 576 megapixels. That is 30 times better than any HDTV. It is similar to a computer screen running with a resolution of 32,000 x 18,000 (try designing a fluid website layout for that...)

Each "picture" our eye sees is about 1.61GB of RAW data (or 249MB if it is saved as JPEG). It would take a high-end laptop about 2 minutes just to save the picture + the time it takes to do any kind of data processing -like pattern recognition, color and motion detection.

Our brain can do the same almost instantly. A test with USAF fighter pilots revealed that they could distinguish visual changes at a rate of 1/220th of a second - a frame-rate of 220 (that would be one hell of a gaming experience). Then imagine the speed of our perception when looking at the subconscious level...

Of course, without my glasses the only thing I can see is a 576 megapixel image of colored fog :)

Comments

Jonathan - Apr. 18, 2007

Although what's more interesting is how many pixels are required for the brain to assume it's looking at reality.

ezra - Sep. 6, 2007

BS. The eye does not have that many megapixels. The research that showed that was flawed.

The human eye only has around 6million cones (for colour vision) to begin with.

And not all cones are utilized. Only those in the fovea. Focus on one spot, an notice how everthing OUTSIDE that small patch of focus is blur?

G - May. 15, 2008

This post is flawed. The eye has about 1.5M captors (=/= the number of rods and cones), max. How could its resolution be higher than that?

Tip: it takes about 100 rods/cones to make a captor (or "ganglion cell").

That means the eye's resolution is around 1.5 megapixel, not 576.

nick - Jul. 3, 2008

what difference does it make?bottom line is that the eye is way better then any camera ,