Why can’t phone cameras take pictures the way I see things at night, even though they can adjust for brightness?
In: Technology
Your phone camera has no aperture to adjust how much light comes into it like our eyes do. So that’s one measure of control gone. Instead phones have to work purely on their ability to separate signal from noise.
Digital cameras detect light with something called a CCD, which is composed of various cells that convert light into an electrical signal. The retina of the eye works on *vaguely* similar principles.
In both cases, there’s a certain amount of “signal” that comes from a proper reaction to light and “noise” generated by spontaneous fluctuations in the media.
When you have a lot of light coming in, the signal is very strong, and the noise is very weak. Imagine noise as random numbers from 0-5 being added to data that ranges from 0-10000. But when it’s dark, and the data coming in is only 0-50, noise gets very hard to filter out. The brain is just really, really good at filtering visual noise.
Part of that is because a lot of what we see is actually the brain extrapolating from the signal it gets and not a picture perfect, “pixel” for “pixel,” true view. This is why optical illusions work on us, because they mess with the processing and interpretation we do on the data. Our brain fills in the gaps in data and gives us an illusion of clarity we don’t actually possess.
**TL;DR, True ELI5** Both struggle to make out shapes in the dark, but our brains are really good at picking out what’s important, and they guess at stuff where they can’t really tell. Phones can’t do that.
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