Ah, so I think my issue might be that I have a lay person's understanding of brightness? I suppose I was thinking as brightness solely as the amplitude of waves. So like, low amplitude is only gonna excite the rods? High amplitude will allow the excitation of cones and at that point frequency will determine which cones are excited? It's been about 15 years since my last physics class, and it was a struggle lol. Definitely not my strength.

So I'm confused. If the fovea is responsible for highest resolution, and the fovea is packed full of cones which are color sensitive, how do we have more resolution with rods (black/white)?

My understanding was that rods are more sensitive to low light. That's why in the dark we have trouble discerning color. Also, our vision tends to be a bit less focused in the dark (more difficulty discerning details) because we're not getting much activation in the fovea, where our central vision is. In bright light, however, the cones will register the blue, green, red, far red wave lengths.

So we're sorta talking about two different "kinds" of light I guess?....white light/ambient light when it's daylight or you're in a lit room and then light in the form of the wave length being reflected off objects (like green curtains, say).

So wouldn't our color vision have higher resolution than our black/white vision, but that our color vision only works when the background intensity reaches a certain threshold. And our black/white vision has less resolution, but works in dimmer environments?

I'm no eye expert, but I spent a year working in a lab that was growing retinal organoids during a CIRM internship (super cool), it's been a few years so I could be remembering incorrectly, or perhaps understood incorrectly from the very beginning!