<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_cell" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_cell</a> claims (with caveats) around 100M light sensitive cells (90M rods and 5M cones), but that doesn't mean 100 megapixels for various reasons.<p>Some differences between the human eye and a typical digital camera:<p>- resolution varies hugely over the retina<p>- color sensitivity varies hugely over the retina (you can't see color outside of the fovea)<p>- the optic nerve has only about 1M ganglion cells (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optic_nerve#Structure" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optic_nerve#Structure</a>), so there is significant 'compression' very early on ("In the fovea, which has high acuity, these ganglion cells connect to as few as 5 photoreceptor cells; in other areas of retina, they connect to many thousand photoreceptors.")<p>- bandwidth of the optic nerve is estimated at 10 mega<i>bit</i> per second (<a href="https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-07/uops-prc072606.php" rel="nofollow">https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-07/uops-prc0726...</a>) (1)<p>- that is very soon further compressed; I can't find decent estimates for what can be consciously seen, but am sure it is less than 1kB/second (corollary: photographic memory doesn't exist)<p>=> "The eye is not a camera" would be a better answer.<p>(1) as with almost all of these estimates, a factor of ten is nothing.