SAMSUNG

Scandal! Samsung phones imagine the details when photographing the moon. Who would have expected it

Did you think your new Samsung had a lens so good it would take a picture of the moon in top quality? Anyway, artificial intelligence is mainly in charge here. And it won’t just be Samsung.

With the launch of the S20 Ultra phones, Samsung introduced the “Space Zoom” function, which allowed you to zoom in up to 100 times. That is, what Huawei has been offering for some time in higher models. If you then took a picture of the moon, the photo was of great quality and detail. But as it turns out, the whole thing is one big marketing circus, because the optics have no chance of capturing our companion in the presented quality. And if it’s not completely easy technically, it simply helps with artificial intelligence. It was apparently trained on hundreds of photos of the moon and therefore can easily add details that would not be in the real photo at all.

Proof has now been provided by Reddit user “u/ibreakphotos”, to whom it seemed from the beginning that it was impossible for a pidi lens to sweat such quality images. Therefore, he downloaded a high-resolution photo of the moon from the Internet, reduced it to a resolution of 170 × 170 px, added a blur, then threw this matlanin on the full screen of the monitor and took a picture. In the resulting photo, the details that the phone added to itself mysteriously appeared.

But if the user turns off the “scene optimizer”, he gets a real picture, that is, a white blurry thing. Of course, phones have been helping each other improve photos for a long time, but here there is no need to sharpen and add details from multiple images, here the phone simply adds data that it doesn’t really have at all. A detailed description of the entire experiment is here (https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11nzrb0/samsung_space_zoom_moon_shots_are_fake_and_here/).

And here’s one more attempt that ibreakphotos added. He deliberately created a blurry photo consisting of a month and a half and tested how the phone’s logic would handle it. Well, you did it.

This is a miniature scaled and distorted image that served as the source of the monitor photo.

And there we have the resulting photo. Samsung rolled in, saw through the trick and improved only the full moon correctly.

by Miroslav Ježek