How many mega-pixels are your eyes?

Answer 1

The human eye is an analog receiver, not digital. Megapixels do not (truly) apply.

As digital cameras have CCDs with a number of photosites (which determine the "megapixel" count of the camera, not the image quality). The human eye has a set number of photo receptor cells. The eye has recently been measured to have a mind-blowing 576 megapixels, but the very small area that the eye actually focuses on is only about 8 megapixels.

Answer 2

Consider a view in front of you that is 90 degrees by 90 degrees, like looking through an open window at a scene. The number of pixels would be

90 degrees * 60 arc-minutes/degree * 1/0.3 * 90 * 60 * 1/0.3 = 324,000,000 pixels (324 megapixels).

At any one moment, you actually do not perceive that many pixels, but your eye moves around the scene to see all the detail you want. But the human eye really sees a larger field of view, close to 180 degrees. Let's be conservative and use 120 degrees for the field of view. Then we would see

120 * 120 * 60 * 60 / (0.3 * 0.3) = 576 megapixels.

The full angle of human vision would require even more megapixels. This kind of image detail requires A large format camera to record.

Answer from http://www.clarkvision.com/imagedetail/eye-resolution.html

Human eye = 576 mega pixels

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I'm afraid this is incorrect in my opinion.

One short paper quotes a figure of 15 megapixels however I'm not totally happy with the way it's been calculated. A brief explanation and a link to the paper is available on the link below. There's also some information from my mum who's an ophthalmologist. She notes the 5 million cones at the centre of the eye provide the high quality vision that we're used to and the 100 million rods and cones around the centre of the eye contribute to peripheral, night and other vision systems.

http://www.articulatednaturality.com/?p=95

The page I originally found the paper linked from is this one.

http://gadgetopia.com/post/5381

Answer 3

576 megapixel