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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 5 megapixel camera, you can capture an image of your hand with all 5-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. 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 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).