how come my 1k+ dollar phone/camera can’t see nearly as much as my eye can. For example, we can both make out the moon clearly, and focus on tiny close up objects, but most cameras can’t.
In: Technology
Your camera can actually see a lot more than your eye can…it’s sensitive to more wavelengths, at much higher resolution over the whole viewing area (your eye only does high-res at a small area around the center), and can focus over a wider range for some lenses.
But…your expensive phone camera is hooked up to an image processor that, in comparison to your brain, is absolutely pathetic. A HUGE amount of image processing happens between your eyeballs and your conscious brain. What you “see” isn’t the raw image recorded on your retina, what you see is a massively processed composite image backed up by a lot of real-time inference and modelling. Your poor phone only gets to take one image at a time, maybe a few if it’s a nice HDR one, you’ve got two eyeballs taking “pictures” constantly and then feeding them to an extremely sophisticated real-time image processor.
Because your eye doesn’t take a picture. It takes two constant streams of info that your brain fills in any missing or wonky info with the best guess and then creates a 3-D real time map of the world around you. They are completely different in both form and purpose. The image your eye collects is actually pretty bad but the brain does a lot to fill in and make it look better.
I’m just taking a stab here but I’d guess it has something to do with the fact that our brains can determine distance on the object we’re forcusing on and adjust focus accordingly. It’s the same logic as “live focus” on your phone except you’re giving it an object to focus on so it tracks that, whereas our brains can make these changes so quickly that they are completely unnoticeable by the human brain; maybe our brains cancel it out the way it does with sound when we’re focusing on someones voice during conversation? IDK…
You eye is not a camera.
A camera is a grid of sensors that get red line by line, row by row. It sees in a predictable pattern.
The sensors in your eye, rods and cones, are not a grid, they are a random-ish collection of cells, each sending out a signal all the time.
A camera has a processor that says, line by line, row by row, RGB.
You brain takes a lot of information, and creates an image in your brain.
Two different things.
* To start with, you don’t have a $1000 camera.
* Most of that price goes to other stuff in the phone.
* If you spent $1000 on just a camera, you’d get a much better image.
* Secondly, your eyes/optic nerves/brain are much better at processing images in a pleasing way than a man-made camera is.
* You have learned since the moment you opened your eyes as a baby how to smoothly interpret the information coming from your eyes.
* Your brain has literally wired itself to be good at processing information from your eyes.
* Man-made cameras don’t really stand a chance.
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