ttps:////»https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd»>
Our eye doesn’t work exactly like a camera, but we can say that the maximum resolution it achieves is close to 250 megapixels. The digital camera creates image files made up of millions of dots. Each point is a pixel and, for the camera to record it in its “negative” – the CCD (charge coupled device) –, photosite, the photosensitive component of digital cameras, comes into play. That is: a camera that uses 1 million photosites registers 1 million pixels, or 1 megapixel.
In the human eye, the role of photosite is played by rods and cones, two types of photosensitive cells distributed along the retina. In both eyes we have about 250 million of these cells and, therefore, we can capture 250 million points of light. Or 250 megapixels. But in practice, things are not so simple. “High-resolution vision is formed only in the fovea, a region that corresponds to one hundredth of the area of the retina”, says neurophysiologist Renato Sabbatini. This does not mean that it is enough to divide the number of megapixels by one hundred, because the distribution of cones and rods in the retina is not uniform like the photosites in the CCD. To complicate things further, in the eye there is so-called interpolation: the images captured by two cells are intertwined. “This absurdly increases the resolution of our vision”, says Sabbatini.