Resolution of the Human Eye in Megapixels
Deviantart.com has posted a very interesting article that calculates the megapixel rating, or amount of image data the average human eye can collect. It’s a lot – somewhere around 576 megapixels. Wow!
The average human retina has five million cone receptors and also a hundred million rods that detect monochrome contrast, which plays an important role in the sharpness of the image you see. The article points out that this 105MP is an underestimate because the eye is not a still camera.
Your two eyes are continually flicking around to cover a much larger area than your field of view and the composite image is assembled in the brain – not unlike stitching together a panoramic photo. In good light, you can distinguish two fine lines if they are seperate by at least 0.6 arc-minutes (0.01 degrees).
This gives an equivilant pixel size of 0.3 arc-minutes. If you take a conservative 120 degrees as your horizontal field of view and 60 degrees in the vertical plane, this translates to 576MP of available image data.
Interestingly, as a counterpoint to this, the author points out that most people cannot distinguish the difference in quality between a 300dpi and a 150dpi photo when printed at 6×4″, when viewed at normal viewing distances. Keep this in mind before running out and buying a new high-resolution printer to please your eyes.
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