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This is misleading on several levels. The size of an image (measured in MP) has almost nothing to do with the angular resolving power of a camera, and even less
by hughes 13y ago
This is misleading on several levels. The size of an image (measured in MP) has almost nothing to do with the angular resolving power of a camera, and even less to do with the resolution of the human eye.
The article didn't mention that every camera tested likely has a slightly different focal length / field of view. Two cameras with the same resolution but different focal lengths will score very differently in these tests. For example, a 32mm lens will see much more detail on the chart than a 14mm lens, even with the same resolution sensor.
Additionally, none of these cameras have the peripheral vision capabilities of the human eye. Our brains pick up quite a lot of information outside the tiny rectangle that these cameras are able to capture. The resolving power of the eye also changes from the center of our vision to the periphery - just because we can read the E on the chart in the middle of our eye doesn't mean we can read it from the edge of our vision.
Comparing eyes to cameras at this level of simplicity is mostly meaningless.
- sp332 13y agoThey mention that the camera has about 60-degree horizontal FOV. A 5MP 16:9 camera is about 2980x1680 pixels, so about 50 pixels per degree.
- trisweb 13y agoAgreed, a eye to a camera is not a comparison, I've worked for a bit in computational vision after my PhD. Our foveal vision makes the connection to digital camera sensors very unsteady. What we have is a spatial filter with diminished acuity as we move away from the focus of our vision. We're actually processing what we believe to be a small amount of information in visual cortex. By the time objects make their way up the ventral visual system, they are encoded by very specific neurons firing for just that object. The brain is also thought to fill in a huge amount of information of our visual field. You can't really leave the brain out of the equation when you estimate the sensitivity of our retina.
- robertnealan 13y agoAlso seems to completely neglect that digital camera sensors perform wildly differently in low light situations independent of the actual image resolution.
- dudus 13y agoHe doesn't mention it but it is fairly obvious in the last test where in low light the best cameras were "blind".
- Sharlin 13y agoPeople don't often realize how poor our visual acuity is everywhere outside the fovea, the area of sharp central vision a few degrees wide (that's a few fingers held together at an arm's length). We need saccades and microsaccades and lots of processing power and plain guesswork on part of the brain to patch together the image we "see". The resolution of a camera sensor, on the other hand, is not a function of the angular distance from the center of the image. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fovea_centralis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fovea_centralis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsaccade http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsaccade
- elwell 13y agoThis is an awesome comment!