Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra is the latest addition to the company’s Ultra series of smartphones. One of the most talked-about features of the phone is its space zoom camera capability. Samsung’s high-end ultra phones like the Galaxy S23 Ultra support 100x Space Zoom which allows users to take pictures of the moon with details and clarity.
However, a recent post by a Reddit user has sparked a controversy around the authenticity of these space zoom photos. The user claims that the photos taken using the phone’s space zoom feature are fake, and that Samsung is using some kind of artificial intelligence trickery to enhance the images.
“Many of us have witnessed the breathtaking moon photos taken with the latest zoom lenses, starting with the S20 Ultra. Nevertheless, I’ve always had doubts about their authenticity, as they appear almost too perfect. While these images are not necessarily outright fabrications, neither are they entirely genuine. Let me explain,” Reddit user going by the name ibreakphotos wrote in a post.
The user goes on to share the details of his personal testing done of the Galaxy S23 moon shot along with the analysis of why he believes the photos are not genuine.
The Redditor started the testing by downloading a high-resolution picture of the moon from the web and compressing it to 170×170 pixels. He blurred the image so that all the details of the moon were lost and then expanded the image to full-screen on his monitor. He turned off all the lights in the room and then captured the moon’s image using Samsung’s space zoom. “Samsung is leveraging an AI model to put craters and other details on places which were just a blurry mess,” he claims.
“And I have to stress this: there’s a difference between additional processing a la super-resolution, when multiple frames are combined to recover detail which would otherwise be lost, and this, where you have a specific AI model trained on a set of moon images, in order to recognize the moon and slap on the moon texture on it (when there is no detail to recover in the first place, as in this experiment). This is not the same kind of processing that is done when you’re zooming into something else, when those multiple exposures and different data from each frame account to something. This is specific to the moon”, Redditor writes in his post.
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