The Incredible Human Eye

The average human retina has five million cone receptors on it. Since the cones are responsible for colour vision, you might suppose that this equates to a five megapixel equivalent for the human eye.
But there are also a hundred million rods that detect monochrome contrast, which plays an important role in the sharpness of the image you see. And even this 105MP is an underestimate because the eye is not a still camera.
You have two eyes (no kidding!) and they continually flick around to cover a much larger area than your field of view and the composite image is assembled in the brain - not unlike stitching together a panoramic photo. In good light, you can distinguish two fine lines if they are separate by at least 0.6 arc-minutes (0.01.Degrees). This gives an equivalent pixel size of 0.3 arc-minutes.
If you take a conservative 120 degrees as your horizontal field of view and 60 degrees in the vertical plane, this translates to 576 megapixels of available image data.
Curiously - as a counterpoint to this - most people cannot distinguish the difference in quality between a 300dpi and a 150dpi photo when printed at 6x4", when viewed at normal viewing distances. So: although the human eye and brain when combined can resolve massive amounts of data, for imaging purposes, 150dpi output is more than enough to provide adequate data for us to accept the result as photographic quality.
But don't forget that women have more cones and men have more rods - I kid you not. Therefore the ladies see colours brighter than gents but can't see as well when it gets dark.

Human Eye Specifications:
Sensor (Retina) : 22mm diameter x 0.5mm thick (section); 10 layers
Resolution : 576MP equiv.
Visual Acuity : ~ 74 MP (Megapixels) (printed) to show detail at the limits of human visual acuity
ISO : 1 - 800 equivalent
Data Rate : 500,000 bits per second without colour or around 600,000 bits per second including colour.
Lens : 2 lenses - 16mm & 24mm diameter
Dynamic Range - Static : contrast ratio of around 100:1 (about 6 1/2 f-stops) (4 seconds)
Dynamic Range - Dynamic : contrast ratio of about 1,000,000:1 (about 20 f-stops) (30 minutes)
Focal Length : ~ 3.2mm - (~ 22mm 35mm equiv)
Aperture : f2.1 - f8.3 (f3.5 dark-adapted is claimed by the astronomical community)
FOV Field of View : 95° Out, 75° Down, 60° In, 60° Up
Color Space - 3D (non-linear)
RGB Color Sensitivity : 10,000,000 (ten million)
Color Range : 380 to 740 nm
White Balance : Automatic (constant perceived color under different lighting)
Refresh Rate : foveal vision (high-quality telescopic) - 3-4fps; peripheral vision (very inaccurate) - up to 90fps



Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_eye
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_vision#Theories_of_color_vision
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_perception
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retina
http://photo.net/photo/edscott/vis00010.htm
http://photo.net/photo/edscott/vis00020.htm
http://www.siliconimaging.com/ARTICLES/CMOS%20PRIMER.htm
http://www.clarkvision.com/imagedetail/eye-resolution.html