As to cameras seeing "much clearer" than the human eye, they are actually so different that they are very difficult to compare. The human eye takes in a much broader picture than a camera, while the camera may bring in more detail in its smaller field of view. This is because the human eye is built so as to see all the bushes a lion might hide behind well enough to catch the suspicious ones, not a really clear view of a lion too far away to be a threat.

Additionally, the human eye was "designed" by a mindless process and honed over millions of years by that process, one that quits whenever the eye was "good enough", while a camera is made to precision in a factory and designed by an intelligent being which can use metal, glass, and plastic rather than having to grow everything from the ground up and going for a pre-determined end goal of making it better.

As for seeing farther, the zoom lenses in/on a camera are like a telescope. This gives them an advantage when focusing on things at a distance. Human eyes have one lens with variable focal length, not a telescope.

There are three main parts to the camera and the eye:

1. the bit that lets the right light in (pupil/aperture)
2. the bit that 'collects' the light and channels it to the back (lens)
3. the bit that actually senses/ detects the light (retina/sensor/film)

The sensor part of a digital camera is actually normally much worse than the human eye. In terms of pixels, the human retina is 10 to 20 times higher resolution than a professional camera (24MP vs ~500MP)

However, the human eye has very limited lenses to collect and focus light.

Firstly, eyes have only two lenses: the cornea for main focusing, and the inner lens for fine tuning. Photography cameras tend to have more than 7 lenses.

Secondly, the human eye's lens can't change shape much, and certainly can't move. This means it has to be set for 'medium range' to allow you to see things quite close, and quite far. Camera lenses can move as much as we want them to - so we can adjust them for very far distances or very close distances fairly easily. And if we need to go even closer or farther, we can change the whole lens set for a set that is better suited to it.

The reason lenses are so important is that there is light everywhere, coming from all different angles. If we don't have a lens and pupil (or aperture) to focus the light we're interested in, and filter out what we don't want, the image will be fuzzy with mixed signals from everywhere else, regardless of how sensitive the detector inside is.

originally film cameras used a reflector to bounce an image onto film, which was light sensitive and would capture the reflected light as an image. This however has changed a lot over time, with them now using digital light sensors instead of film, which has in most cases eliminated the need for the mirror.