Samsung’s moon shots have us asking how much AI is too much

Have you heard of the lunar conspiracy theory? No, not about the moon landing. We are talking about Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultraand a theory in which it creates pictures of the moon, producing images far more detailed than the camera itself can produce.

Is this true? The reality is a bit more complicated than a clean yes or no answer. And the closer you look, the more you realize that whether a photo is “real” or not is something you can ask about most photos you take. with the phone.

Monthly release of land

The Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra Moongate saga began when a Reddit user ibreakphotos published reports about their own experiments with moon photography. They claim that when someone captures the moon using the phone’s super-extended hybrid zoom mode, Samsung effectively superimposes a lunar texture on the images.

This is something Samsung denies. We reached out to the company for an official statement: “Samsung is committed to delivering best-in-class photography in all conditions. When the user takes a photo of the moon, the AI-based scene optimization technology recognizes the moon as the main subject and takes multiple shots for a multi-frame composition, after which the AI ​​enhances the image quality and color details. It does not apply any image overlay to the photo. Users can turn off the AI-based Scene Optimizer, which will disable automatic detail enhancement of any photos taken.”

Creating a single image from multiple exposures is at the core computer photography. But as ibreakphotos proved, there’s more going on here. The Samsung fake photo controversy shows that some user tests were pretty clever. The photo of the moon was blurry and reflected in the distance, which severely limited how much detail could be captured, regardless of the quality of the camera’s optics.

However, the image of the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra still gives the impression that it has much more detail than the original image. The effect of their patterned images is dramatic.

This test, unsurprisingly, was repeated in other places after this moon problem started. Well-known YouTuber Marques Brownlee tried it, for example, and found that while his results weren’t as dramatic as ibreakphotos on Reddit, they were. Creator of mobile photography content Results Shane Mostyn sat somewhere between them.

Does the moon travel in a circle?

Something happening here. But this is not the kind of information that you can verify on the Internet, because this problem has arisen before.

Two years ago, Samsung introduced Moon mode processing with the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra, because it in turn introduced us to the company’s 10x zoom camera and 100x hybrid “space zoom”. Its successor, the S21 Ultra, with an even better zoom, was accused of photo-faking, leading Login to investigate for himself, and he came to basically the same conclusions we see today. The Galaxy S21 Ultra did a little more than standard image processing when shooting the moon.