Why can’t phone cameras take pictures the way I see things at night, even though they can adjust for brightness?
In: Technology
A camera is a very dumb tool with lots of limitations. Those limitations can be mitigated with technological advancements, but at the end of the day, it’s just a hunk of metal glass and plastic trying to capture photons.
The way that you see with your eyes is very nearly magic. Your eyes bring in light, the light is picked up by your rods and cones, and then the info is sent to your brain where all the magic happens. Your brain can filter things, adjust for things, and even make up information where there really isn’t any. Your eyes and brain also have a very very wide “dynamic range” which is the range of brightness levels you can perceive at once, from really bright lights and into deep dark shadows. Some of this is the nature of our eyes, and some of this is down to the enormous power of our brains processing the information quickly. More importantly, your vision is set up specifically to be giving you information needed to hunt, defend yourself, be aware of threats or resources, etc. So when there are flaws or deficiencies, your brain doesn’t really alert you to them, it just does what it has to do to keep you safe and healthy. You may think that you can see very well in really really low light where a camera sees absolutely nothing, but if you really examine the image your brain is perceiving, you may notice that you are essentially seeing black and white, because we don’t pick up color well in ultra low light, and yet your brain will do its best to show you “false color” because you know “that truck is red” even if you can’t see it. So you brain will basically paint the color in for you based on your knowledge.
A camera can’t (yet) use the intelligent power to make those adjustments the same way your mind can. It just shows you everything it can technically capture, without any fakery or trickery to help fill in blanks, remove distractions, or make up for deficiencies. They also have far lower ranges of capabilities between bright and dark spots, so at night where you have a very bright street lamp and a very dim car interior, your eyes will show you both levels of exposure, but a camera will have to pick one or the other, and you’ll get a blown out white light and an interior you can see, or a well exposed light and a black interior. The technology just isn’t there yet to expand that dynamic range. On cameras with larger sensors, the dynamic range is better, but still very limited compared with the human eye. The camera also can’t fill in the blanks when it comes to colors, so what might look vibrant and detailed to your eye is going to look muddy and “accurate” in a photo.
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