Answer: 576 megapixels. That would be a VERY nice camera—but think about the filesize. How in the world do people who have eidetic memory store all the information?

If the human eye was a digital camera, how many megapixels would it have?

Clarkvision does the calculations.

The answer: 576 megapixels.

Impressive job — I wish I had thought to do that. Note that their calculations require a bit of fudging: the fovea actually covers just a tiny bit of the visual field; the eye must move from point to point in order to assemble an image this detailed. A digital camera records all the pixels at the same time. For the photographically inclined, the article also goes on to make several other camera/eye calculations.

A separate question: could a 576 megapixel image “fool” your visual system into believing it was seeing the real thing? Assuming one eye was covered and you were not allowed to move, I think it could. But as soon as you viewed the image with both eyes or were allowed to move, then you would be able to detect the fact that the image was flat. Three-dimensional images look different when viewed from different perspectives, but flat images don’t.