Similarities Between Camera and Human Eye

How Does a Camera Work?

When talking about cameras, there’s one main distinction to make – whether it’s a digital camera or a film camera. Today, almost every camera is digital – it can create pictures faster, those pictures can be further edited, they can also be preserved almost indefinitely… There are, of course, some people that prefer the old-fashioned film cameras. They use a long spool of plastic with some special chemicals that react in contact with light – a film. After taking your picture, you need to have it developed, which is a long and tedious process that usually takes several days. Obviously, digital photography, which stores photographs as series of bits (ones and zeros), is much more effective and is mostly used today. However, both cameras require a lens in order to work correctly – the purpose of the lens is to collect the light from the outside, focus it, and send it to the corresponding points on the film, or to sensors which transform it into a digital signal in the case of a digital camera. These sensors can either be a charge-coupled device (CCD) or a standard CMOS image sensor, which is a bit more common.

How Does the Human Eye Work?

The foremost part of the human eye consists of a structure called the cornea. It focuses the light, the same way a camera lens does. Behind it is the iris, a structure that gives the eyes their color. It has a hole at its center, called the pupil. This hole can expand or tighten, changing the amount of absorbed light. Finally, the focused light is even more finely focused through the lens, which is affected by our ciliary muscles, which change how far away or close by do we see clearly by contracting and relaxing. Finally, the focused light reaches the back end of the eye – the retina. It consists of a large amount of light-sensitive cells – rods and cones. Rods detect the intensity of the light, while cones detect its color. They send signals further to the brain, where the image is being processed and we actually perceive what we see in front of us.

Similarities between a Camera and a Human Eye

The human eye is actually classified as a “camera-type eye”, but nevertheless they aren’t completely the same. The detection mechanism is completely different, and, while cameras preserve the taken photograph either on a film or a memory card, humans “save” them, only as memories, which are affected by many conditions, including your mood at the time you saw something, your eyesight, medical condition, etc… This means that the biggest similarity comes from the lens mechanism:

Similarities between a Camera and a Human Eye in terms of “ Lens”

They both use lens as a way to focus light.

Be it human lens or artificial lens, the mechanism is the same. It should be noted, though, that, in order to achieve the same versatility of the human lens, a camera would have to use several lenses stacked, sine the human lens can focus objects that are very close or very far away.

Similarities between a Camera and a Human Eye in terms of “ Iris”

They both have an iris that opens and closes to allow light to pass through

This is another part of a camera that got its name from a part of the human eye. It’s a mechanism that opens or closes on the camera in order to allow different amounts of light to pass through, the similar way a human iris can tighten or widen.

Summary points on similarities between a Camera and a Human Eye

Film cameras were a major discovery back in 1816, and digital cameras are owned by one in three people. A major part of their effectiveness cameras own to the fact that their creators looked for inspiration in our own eyes. The main similarities between the human eye and the camera are the usages of lenses and an iris. The same two can be found in the human eye. However, methods for detection and storage of photographs are completely different.