Your eyes are pretty amazing.

In a fraction of a second, they can focus from infinity to, well, grab a ruler to see how close.

I've got five inches before it becomes blurry.

But there are some schmancy cameras out there.

How do they compare to your eyesight?

And would you ever want to replace your eyeball with a camera?

It's eyeball versus camera smackdown.

[bell dinging] Round 1-- Which one focuses better?

And what does it mean to be in focus?

Yeah, it means that your image is sharper and clearer, but how do you make it sharp?

Imagine this enormous chocolate bunny as a bunch of small, brown dots in the shape of the bunny.

Light rays hit each dot and bounce off in diverging directions.

To form an image, you have to use a lens to bend the rays back into a dot, and then they diverge again.

If your camera sensor or your eyeball's retina is right where that dot forms on that sweet spot, the image will be in focus.

If their position is off, the dot is going to blur and then all those dots will blur together and you'll be out of focus.

So a camera focuses light with a glass lens, which doesn't change shape, but it can move backwards and forwards as you adjust the focus, and that will put light from objects different distances away and focus on the camera sensor, on that sweet spot.

Your eyeball, on the other hand, doesn't have a lens that can move backwards and forwards, but instead uses the ciliary muscles around the lens to bend the shape of the lens so it focuses on objects different distances away.

So thanks to those super fast muscles around your eye, a healthy human eye can focus from infinity to about 10 inches in front of your face in a third of a second, which is partially why, when you look around a room and you're focusing on objects different distances away, it kind of seems like everything's in focus, because your eye is changing focus so fast, your brain doesn't have time to notice that things are out of focus.

Now, the best cameras claim that they focus about five times faster than the human eye.

But they don't always focus on what you want them to.

Auto focus can get a bit manic.

An affordable auto focus is way less accurate compared to your eye.

So for versatility, round one goes to the eyeball.

[bell dinging] Which contender is better at capturing moving targets?

So a camera captures things that are moving by using a really fast shutter speed.

That is, it opens and closes the shutter of the camera really, really quickly.

In essence, you're freezing a moment in time.

Before cameras, humans didn't even know how horses galloped.

It wasn't until the 1870s when Eadweard Muybridge took some of the first high-speed photographs to figure out how horses move their feet when they run.

So we can't resolve a horse's gallop, but we still have a lot of really cool tricks to make sure that when you move around, you get a clear image.

If you move your head around, your eyes will move the opposite direction of your head to make sure that the same spot is staying in the center of your field of view.

Your eyes don't necessarily move when you move your head around.

This is called the vestibulo ocular reflex.

Or if you've ever watched someone's eyes as they're riding in a moving car, their eyes flick back and forth, because they'll follow an object, like a tree, until moves out of their field of view.

And then they'll focus on the next image.

This is called the optokinetic reflex.

Think about how cool these reflexes are.

You definitely can't swing your camera back and forth and hope to get a nice photo.

I tried.

So I'm going to call this one a tie.

Knowing how horses gallop is pretty cool.

But reading road signs, kind of important.

[bell dinging] Final round-- which one is smarter?

OK.

So your eyeball has the processing power of your brain behind it.

Those stabilizing reflexes, refocusing in a fraction of a second, that's all your brain.

Plus, it's got some other really cool tricks, like piecing together two different images from either eye into one single 3D image or automatic color correction in different lighting.

But this automatic color correction is also why we can be fooled into thinking square A is different from square B when they're the same and why people argued over the color of this dress.

And camera technology is just getting better and more intelligent.

Engineers have been able to replicate some of the capabilities of our eyesight in cameras.

Cameras can automatically color correct in different lighting.

And some cameras can recognize faces.

But again, lots of these advances in camera technology have been to mimic the human eye, which has been the model for cameras, not the other way around.

So this round goes to the eyeball.

So the eyeball beat the camera in the smackdown.

[cheering] But it was never a fair fight.

I mean, the eyeball has the processing power of the brain behind it.

Now this all brings me to the question, would you ever want to replace your eyeball with a camera?

Well, scientists are already experimenting with this kind of cybernetics in devices like the Argus II, which is a device where the wearer wears a camera on some glasses that take a picture and then send that to a converter box, which sends an electrical signal back into electrodes implanted on your retina that your brain then has to interpret as something like sight.

One woman wearing the Argus II claimed that she could see light and dark and could distinguish some pixelated shapes.

So wearing this device, you don't automatically see like a normal person.

Your brain has to take those electrical signals on your retina and reinterpret those as something like sight.

But you might have a sense that's different than any of the five senses that the rest of humans have, which is a pretty cool notion.