Further reading can be found at Cambridge in Colour and Pixiq.
Digital cameras and human eyes fulfill largely the same function: images come in through a lens and are focused onto a light sensitive surface, which converts them into electrical impulses that can be processed by the brain or a computer respectively. There are some differences, however.
Human eyes have a very sensitive area in the centre of their field of vision called the fovea. Objects that we are looking at directly are in sharp detail, while our peripheral vision is quite poor. We have separate sets of cone cells in the retina for sensing red, green and blue (RGB) light, but we also have special rod cells that are sensitive to light levels, allowing us to perceive a wide dynamic range of bright and dark colours. The retina has a blind spot (a place where all the nerves bundle together to send signals to the brain through the optic nerve), but most of the time we don’t notice it because we have two eyes with overlapping fields of view, and we can move them around very quickly.
Digital cameras have uniform sensitivity to light across their whole field of vision. Light intensity and colour are picked up by RGB sensor elements on a silicon chip, but they aren’t as good at capturing a wide range of light levels as our eyes are. Typically, a modern digital camera can automatically tune its exposure to either bright or dark scenes, but it might lose some detail (e.g. when it is tuned for dark exposure, any bright objects might just look like white blobs).
It is important to understand that neither a human eye nor a digital camera – even a very expensive one – can perfectly capture all of the information in the scene in front of it. Electronic engineers and computer scientists are constantly doing research to improve the quality of the images they capture, and the speed at which they can record and process them.
Further reading can be found at Cambridge in Colour and Pixiq.