So for example, if you try to capture a bright area with a camera, the other surrounding area can become too dark due to the camera “dilating” so that the bright area is not too bright, but our eyes can look at it fine.
Our eyes dilate too, but it’s not nearly as much as a camera.
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Dynamic range is the max difference in brightness in a scene where you can make out detail in the brightest and darkest bits simultaneously. Dynamic range is measured in f-stops, where one f-stop is a factor of two in brightness. A great camera can resolve about 15 f-stops difference (~32000x), with a phone somewhere in the 10-14 f-stop range.
The human eye, can resolve about 14 f-stops of dynamic range, which is similar to a top of the range camera.
However – the eye *and brain* working together can exceed 24 f-stops! (~16M times brightness difference!)
How does this work? Well your eye actually has a very narrow sharp field of view, most of your vision is quite blurry and only the centre is sharp. Subconsciously you move your eye around all the time to scan the whole scene, and as your eye looks at different things it dynamically adjusts based on the brightness. Your brain is able to maintain this brightness information as you look around meaning you perceive a very high dynamic range.
A fairer comparison would be to film scanning across a scene through a zoom lens, as you look at the shade and bright areas, the camera dynamically adjusts exposure (pretty poorly compared to the eye, but it works none the less.) If you then post processed the video you could make an image where the bright and dark bits had detail.
A camera exposes the whole scene at once and needs to balance the exposure to try and preserve the most detail.
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