One of the features that cell phone cameras boast is the famous “lunar mode“, the ability to photograph our natural satellite at a magnification that shows it in incredible detail.
However, it seems that Samsung you are not so transparent with this function. Because?
A recent post on Reddit clearly showed how much computational processing the company is doing and, given the evidence provided, claimed that Samsung’s images of the moon are fake.
A test of Samsung phones by Reddit user u/ibreakphotos involved taking an intentionally blurry photo of the Moon, displaying it on a computer screen, and then capturing that image using a Samsung S23 Ultra. As you can see below, the first image on the screen didn’t show any details., but the resulting image showed a sharp, clear “picture” of the Moon. The S23 Ultra has added details that were simply not there before. There was no increase in blurry pixels or recovery of apparently lost data. There was only one new moon, a false one.
Here is the blurry image of the moon that was used:
GIF of the photography process:
And the resulting “photo”:
The broad interpretation is that Samsung’s process captures the blurry details of the original photo and then enhances them with artificial intelligence.
Redditor links to article msila where the company cites a claim that the 100x zoom feature on the Galaxy S21 Ultra captures multiple frames in seconds and uses artificial intelligence to fine-tune details. Contrary to recent statements and the old article SamMobileit seems that the Space Zoom feature enhances the details already captured by the Galaxy S21 Ultra camera.
However, Samsung goes on to explain the following Space Zoom facts in a MSPower post:
The AI will start first by detecting the scene/image in the preview phase, testing it against an AI model trained on hundreds of thousands of images. Once the camera detects and identifies an image as a specific scene, such as the moon, it offers a feature to enhance detail by reducing blur and noise.. The actual photo will usually be of higher quality than the camera preview. This is due to the additional AI-based multi-image processing that occurs during photo capture.
Source: Digital Trends
