Just curious....

What camera and lens set up would be equivalent to what the human eye sees?

It hasn't been invented yet..........

I think 50mm, but I'm not sure.

Skinny431 wrote: I think 50mm, but I'm not sure.

Correct on a film or full frame digital. On a crop sensor (APS) that would be a 35mm for 1:1. Of course, you lose peripheral vision.

Baydream wrote:

Skinny431 wrote: I think 50mm, but I'm not sure.

Correct on a film or full frame digital. On a crop sensor (APS) that would be a 35mm for 1:1. Of course, you lose peripheral vision.

Exactly!
The 50mm is the old kit lens of the past and the original live view.
Problem with the crop sensors is you cant really get that but, I guess they do make the DX 50mm now, I wouldnt know because the only DX lens I have is the 10.5 fisheye, the rest of mine are film lenses.

A dual full frame setup with 50mm lenses set around 65mm apart and a processor with AI advanced enough to perceive a sense of stereoscopic depth. Better yet, the same thing with dual lenses around 12mm each for a horozontal FOV of approximately 120 degrees each, with perfect rectilinear distortion correction to include peripherial vision.

Until that gets invented, a nifty fifty will do

A Tim Grey excerpt........

The key issues here are angle of view and perspective, and I think the easiest way for me to answer this question is to say that there really isn't a definitive answer. That's because there are quite a large number of variables, and considerable differences between a digital sensor (or film for that matter) and the human visual system.

Generally speaking, the guideline is to think of a 50mm focal length as having the same field of view as the human visual system. This, of course, is based on a 35mm format. For a digital SLR, that means what is often referred to as a 1:1 or "full frame" image sensor. If you're using a digital camera with a different size image sensor, the equivalent focal length will be different. For example, for a camera with a 1.6X factor for field of view (often referred to now as a cropping factor) the equivalent would be about a 30mm focal length.

Of course, this is messy right from the start, because it turns out not to be all that easy to define the field of view of the human visual system. The 50mm focal length is an approximate match for the area of sharp focus for the human visual system. The actual field of view of the human eye is closer to about a 22mm focal length. And again, these focal lengths are based on a 35mm SLR format.

Your reference to a longer lens as well as a wider angle is obviously contradictory, and that relates to your perspective. As you can imagine based on the above info, the perspective you perceive with your eyes versus the camera is different. This is in some ways an illusion, since the perspective is really a matter of distances from key subjects in the frame. But again, there are many variables that affect the perception of the scene. And don't forget that quite often our position relative to the subject is quite a bit different from the position of the image sensor in the camera.

This is somewhat related to the issue of dynamic range and depth of field. Many perceive the human visual system as having a very high dynamic range and a very deep depth of field. That's actually not the case at all. The reality is that our vision has a relatively low dynamic range and narrow depth of field, but we perceive both as being greater than they are because our eyes are able to adjust so quickly both in terms of focus and eposure.

That said, as a general rule you can think of a 50mm focal length (based on 35mm format) as being equivalent to what we generally perceive our field of view to be, and about a 22mm focal length as being the equivalent to what we would observe our field of view to be if we really concentrate and try to figure out just how wide our actual field of view is.


Now, wasn't that easy?

SNAP!