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Rods, Cones, and Pixels per Inch
In the center of our retina, is a tiny dimple-like area (the fovea) that is packed with a super-high concentration of visual sensors. This is the area in our field-of-vision that is sharp & detailed enough to accomplish most tasks. Since this high-resolution area is so small (½mm), we constantly move our eyes to place this sharp region toward whatever we wish to see. When looking at something across a 12-foot room, this ½mm region of our retina projects out to about a one inch diameter area on the opposite wall; everything outside this circle rapidly decreases in resolution (visual sharpness) as shown in the illustration below.
If you hold your hand in front of a 10-megapixel camera, you can capture an image of your hand with all 10-million pixels. But if your hand is on the far side of a room, then considerably less amount of pixels is used to cover the same area of your hand and therefore less detail is captured. The same goes for our vision; we have a certain quantity of light sensors (megapixels) and the farther an item is from our eye, the less sensors/pixels we have to see that item and it's detail. If we project our eye's resolution out to various distances, some interesting numbers can easily be calculated....
Distance of Object:
Visual Resolution:		14in
800ppi		38in
300ppi		57in
200ppi		9½ft
100ppi		12ft
80ppi		19ft
50ppi		120ft
8ppi		960ft
1ppi		1mile
2ppf
These 'visual resolution' numbers indicate the level of detail we can detect under ideal conditions (bright light and very high-contrast between pixels). For example: at 3-feet away, we observe objects with about 300 pixels-per-inch resolution, and at 12-feet away, we can barely discern 80ppi detail. And that is only in the very center of our vision which quickly fades to lower resolutions (see illustration below).
Human Eye Resolution
A few more facts
At 570-yards, a golf ball is one pixel on our retina (the size of one cone sensor) which is just barely discernible with a bright-white object on a deep-black background with strong sunlight and very carefully focused attention. A 25¢ coin is one pixel at 31-yards; a regulation basketball is one pixel at 1½-miles. When looking at the moon, one human pixel is about 22-miles on the lunar surface.