Quote:
Originally Posted by haertig
The human eye can detect photons hitting the retina, given a high enough quantity of photons. The source of the photon(s) can be infinitesimally small, [...]
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That, of course, is oversimplifying it a little bit too much. You almost make it sound as if the eye (or rather the retina) is just a dumb sensor. The retina is technically part of the brain unlike all the other senses which are merely sending signals to be interpreted by the brain. The visual cortex still plays an important role in interpreting, especially coordinating and mixing the signals from both eyes, but a lot of image processing, pattern recognition, and data compression already happens in the retina before it ever hits the visual cortex. The optic nerve simply does not have enough bandwidth. Comparing the retina with a sensor in a camera is not doing the retina any justice.
Or in short: increasing the resolution higher than the "native resolution" of the retina can make the image look better even past the point of being able to resolve individual pixels.