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.

Question

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

Answer 1

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.