When wll sensors match our eyes?

[Bennymiata]

I was watching an interesting show on cable a few nights ago about the human eye.
and why some people are colour blind and some are not.

Like the sensors in our camera, the retina is populated by "sensors" that are sensitive to one of 3 colours, and colourblind people are generally only sensitive to 2 colours.
Some scientist has now worked out how to replace the missing colour on a retina to give the patient full colour vision.
He hasn't operated on humans as yet, but his work with monkeys has been very successful, so hopefully, soon there will be a cure for colour-blindness.
It seems that the males of a particular monkey species are colour-blind, whereas the females are not and it has been discovered that the male monkeys cannot see the colour red so he has worked out a way of introducing these red receptors into the eye to give full colour vision.
The tests I saw on TV showed that male monkeys had full colour vision after the operation where they did not have it beforehand.

Another interesting thing was how many receptors each of our eyes have, and it seems that our eyes have around 100 milion sensors per eye.
That's 200million pixels in total, so our cameras still have a way to go to match the definition our eyes have.

[pmack]

hmmm dunno about you being able to compare 100 million sensors on our eyes with pixels on a camera.
Our eyes my have that many locations, but I don't think we can resolve the detail on each site as you can with the sensor on camera.
by that i mean if you take a wide angle photo with a 100mp sensor, pretty sure that could see finer detail than the naked eye.

dynamic range, that's another thing. improved dynamic range is surely not far away

[arthurking83]

Current sensor technology may be way behind the eye in terms of overall ability(eg dynamic range), but it won't be long before sensor technology leaps ahead(if it hasn't already).
There's not really all that much room for improvement of the human eye, is there!

And the other side of the coin is that we have no real idea on what the cutting edge of sensor technology is really capable of(eg. in scientific/military fields).
Just because a consumer or professional level camera sensor is not as capable as the human eye, doesn't necessarily mean that the technology is not currently out there that is better.

Another thing to point out is that sensor and eye abilities are not really comparable anyhow!
Where with the eye, you have a sensor and a lens assembly all in one, with a digital sensor, you don't automatically get a ray focusing system built in!
That is, with the sensor, it requires a lens, and I'm not referring to only the DSLR system. All digital sensors require a lens to focus the scene onto the sensor.
They are separate technologies, and if money was no object, I'm sure that you would mate the best possible lens to the best possible sensor tech to achieve truly astonishing image forming abilities.

[Pine]

The eyes are simply amazing but the post processing of the brain is even more amazing.

I don't think that the combination of the two will ever be matched electronically

Regards

[Steve Axford]

I agree with pine and I would add that a digital sensor is already much better than the eye. The bit our camera lacks is our brain. That's the bit that gives all the fancy stuff. The dynamic range of our eye (one pixel to the next) is about 10. And that's not 2 to the 10th, but 10, ie 2 to 3 or 4. So our digital camera is way better. Where the eye/brain excels is that it scans and remembers. Our brain predicts the future and remembers the past. A camera is dumb. And, incidentally, one pixel in our eye is not one rod or cone, it is a collection of them, so we cannot resolve to 100 million pixels. Nowhere near. Another thing. Our eye has no colour sensors except in the centre of our visual field. Yet we see colour everywhere. Figure that one out.

[Pine]

I agree with pine and I would add that a digital sensor is already much better than the eye. The bit our camera lacks is our brain. That's the bit that gives all the fancy stuff. The dynamic range of our eye (one pixel to the next) is about 10. And that's not 2 to the 10th, but 10, ie 2 to 3 or 4. So our digital camera is way better. Where the eye/brain excels is that it scans and remembers. Our brain predicts the future and remembers the past. A camera is dumb. And, incidentally, one pixel in our eye is not one rod or cone, it is a collection of them, so we cannot resolve to 100 million pixels. Nowhere near. Another thing. Our eye has no colour sensors except in the centre of our visual field. Yet we see colour everywhere. Figure that one out.

Well put

If one wears glasses that turns the picture upside down long enough the brain will turn it upright again

I am awed at God's creation all the time.

Regards

[darrenmars]

Digital backs are available for meidum format cameras that have a dynamic range of 12 stops (reportedly) and an 80MP resolution...

edit: I'm sure I read on their website somewhere about flexible sensor abilities too!