Capabilities of Modern Image Sensors

In the 1st lecture, George mentioned that human eye has ~100M rods and cones. He claimed that no camera could capture that many pixels. It is true that no consumer electronic class digital cameras are on par but more professional ones do.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_sensor#Sensors_used_in_digital_cameras shows that DSLRs people are buying today have up to 24M pixels.Digital camera backs from companies like Hasselblad and Phase One have more, much more. Those are the choices of serious photographers who shoot landscapes and want to preserve as many details in the scene as possible.If 200MP is still not enough for the task, there is Better Light whose product offer up to 2826MP for high-end applications.

Despite all these facts, human eye is still genius structure.

Computers do calculations much faster than human brains now, but we are still struggling to make them "think". People are so eager to make them think that they call their products "ThinkPad" or "ThinkCenter". Thinkpads do not think, we do.

Similarly, those image sensors do not see as we human beings do. To the best of my knowledge, there is no such technology or system. There are systems that have a larger view, see farther away objects more clearly or see without visible light, but you just do not want to abandon your eyes and transplant any of those systems as a substitution.