This week, Samsung has been involved in a controversy regarding the authenticity of the Galaxy S23 Ultra’s Space Zoom photographs, which provide detailed images of the moon.
Samsung allegedly faking moon photos
According to a Reddit post, the Galaxy S23 Ultra’s moon photographs are allegedly fake because the device adds artificial details to moon images.
While Reddit user ibreakphotos stated that this was technically true, Samsung was adding detail to moon photographs in practice, as confirmed by their own testing. The test involves getting an image of the moon from the internet, blurring it on a computer screen, and then taking it from a distance using a Galaxy S23 Ultra in a dark room.
Here is Samsung’s official response sent to Tom’s Guide, “Samsung is committed to delivering best-in-class photo experiences in any condition. When a user takes a photo of the Moon, the AI-based scene optimization technology recognizes the Moon as the main object and takes multiple shots for multi-frame composition, after which AI enhances the details of the image quality and colors. It does not apply any image overlaying to the photo. Users can deactivate the AI-based Scene Optimizer, which will disable automatic detail enhancements to the photo taken by the user.”
According to the Redditor, after applying a gaussian blur, there was simply no data for the Galaxy S23 Ultra’s image signal processor or computational photography algorithms to process.
The picture that was provided, however, shows a lot more details than the original picture did. The Redditor called the Galaxy S23 Ultra’s astrophotography moon shots “fake”, claiming that the detail improvements were added.
ibreakphotos mentioned that while some may believe that Samsung is just leveraging your camera’s capabilities, it really uses AI/ML (neural networks trained on hundreds of moon shots) to recover and add the texture of the moon to your moon photos.
Since all of the frames in his experiment have the same level of detail, he said that there is no sharpening or addition of detail from different frames. Although being purposefully blurred, the craters, etc., are not visible in any of the shots, yet for some reason, the camera mysteriously knows that they are there.
In the end, it’s up to you whether you find these improvements to be acceptable or not. Samsung insists that its AI-based scene optimization technology is part of its commitment to providing the best-in-class photo experiences under any circumstance.
