I’m not convinced that the eye is conclusively better than any camera out there. The human brain is incredible at stitching together visual input into a coherent view of the world. The retina has high resolution but covers an incredibly small field of view; rapid eye movements make it possible to fake a larger effective field of view. And I’m not convinced that the retina’s resolution is actually better than that of high-end camera systems. The eye’s performance in the periphery is decidedly worse than that of a wide-angle camera.

Dynamic range is a challenge for cameras, but we have high-dynamic-range imaging nowadays (both in software, i.e. exposure combining, and hardware). I don’t think the eye is significantly superior here.

Low-light used to be a strength of the human visual system, but I think modern computational imaging systems have caught up (plus, human night vision was really never that good compared with other animals).

So in short: I dispute the idea that cameras don’t have the acuity of the human visual system, nowadays. I’d like to know in which aspects you believe human eyes to still be superior, from an optical point of view. Obviously - the human brain and visual cortex is something that computers are nowhere close to.

> So in short: I dispute the idea that cameras don’t have the acuity of the human visual system, nowadays. I’d like to know in which aspects you believe human eyes to still be superior, from an optical point of view.

Dynamic range. Your eyes can pick up subtle details in a scene with very bright lights, and very dark shadows.

No video camera currently exists that can take a good video from inside a city, at night, with a starry night sky. Either the stars, or the lights, or the shadows are going to look like crap. Your eyes can trivially handle such a problem.

our vision system is mostly lousy optics coupled with outstanding processing.

The ability to capture both stars and a daylit scene using the same sensor is pretty hardcore. But yes, there's some fancy processing layer which is far harder to replicate than the optics. Last time I tried if I point a generic (not specialised for the task) camera at the night sky I get blackness but my eyes see stars.

On the optics, I'd say the human eye is specialized, but not on the whole outstanding. Fantastic dynamic range, lousy spatial and time resolution, a very good tracking mount. It's just compromised on the things (resolution) that can be filled in with fast scanning over a scene + post-processing.

This seems nonsensical given the telescopes we use to see things that cannot be seen with the naked eye.

Open the lid on that telescope during the day, and you'll fry the telescope.

Your eyes can operate - and operate well - in an incredibly broad array of lighting conditions. No single camera exists that can currently do that.