Eye vs Camera _ GCSE Physics

The eye is a combination of smaller parts which give you the ability to be watching this video right now. It’s made up of 8 main parts; at the front is the cornea. This refracts light by a fixed amount to help us focus the light. The pupil is simply the hole where the light enters the eye and the size of this hole is controlled by the iris. Once the light gets in, it’s refracted further by the lens, which can be adjusted to refract more or less in a process called accommodation. When an object is near the ciliary muscles contract to make the lens more curved. This causes the suspensory ligaments to slacken and the light focuses directly onto the retina, which processes the light and triggers electrical impulses to be sent to the brain through the optical nerve. If the object is far away the opposite occurs. The ciliary muscles relax and the suspensory ligaments stretch, causing the lens to flatten out in order to focus the light correctly. Cameras are designed very similarly to the eye, probably because of how efficient it is. To focus the light it uses a converging lens, which is adjusted by bringing the lens closer or further away from the film or charge-coupled device. This part isn’t the same as the eye because the glass lens only has a constant shape. The aperture of the camera adjusts size to control how much light enters it, which is very similar to the iris and pupil. As I mentioned earlier the film or charge-coupled device detects the light and converts them to electrical signals, very similar to the retina. Although the resolution of cameras are extremely high and they can capture video at very high frame rates, I think the eye takes the lead as it’s an amazing feat of evolution.