Redditor proves Samsung Moon shots are heavily fabricated

A Redditor is making a bold claim about Samsung’s Galaxy S23 Ultra and its Moon photography.

According to ‘ibreakphotos’ on the Android Reddit page, “Samsung space zoom moon shots are fake.”

“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,” wrote u/ibreakphotos.

According to the user, Samsung adds detail to Moon shots where there is none, with the AI doing most of the heavy lifting and not the phone’s camera optics.

To prove the claims, the Redditor downloaded this high-res image of the Moon from the internet and downsized it to 170 x 170 pixels. The Redditor then blurred the photo so that no detail of the Moon was visible. u/ibreakphotos then put the image on full screen on their monitor, turned off the lights, moved to the other end of the room and zoomed in on the digitally blurred image with their Samsung device.

The image the Redditor clicked with their device was this one. Essentially, they shot the image on the left and got the image on the right as a result.

It’s safe to say that the details captured in the photo couldn’t have been possible because they weren’t clearly visible in the blurred image in the first place, leading me to ask, are all Samsung Ultra device Moon shots essentially fake? Well, the images or not entirely fake, but they’re not entirely genuine, either.

“Samsung is leveraging an AI model to put craters and other details on places which were just a blurry mess,” wrote the Reddit user. “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).”

The experiment doesn’t fail to prove that Samsung’s marketing is deceptive, considering that the AI software trained on Moon images is doing most of the work, and fabricating images, at least in some capacity, in contrast to the phone’s camera doing the heavy lifting.

Check out u/ibreakphotos‘ full experiment on Reddit here.

Image credit: u/ibreakphotos

Source: u/ibreakphotos