Samsung seems to be in trouble as it has allowed many people to confuse its AI-improved images for a physics-defying optical zoom that cannot fit in a smartphone. The company’s “Space Zoom”-capable phones have been known for recreating a detailed photo of the Moon. Well, a Redditor believes that Samsung’s pictures of the Moon are fake and he has evidence.
Perhaps we need to give the term “fake” some context. This will be hard to contextualize given the increasingly important and complex computational photography techniques that are used in smartphone photography given the smaller size of their sensors. AI makes everything appear “fake” as a perfect photo from a phone can be debatable when compared to a full DSLR camera. Also when you put a filter over your Instagram, Snapchat, or Tiktok video and image can we say that this media is “fake”? As I told you, it will be tricky to contextualize Well, for now, let’s get back to Samsung and the Moon.
The Reddit user‘s experiment was very ingenious in its simplicity. They created an intentionally blurry photo of the Moon, displayed it on a computer screen, and then photographed this image using a Samsung S23 Ultra. As you can see below, the first image on the screen showed no detail, but the resulting picture showed a crisp and clear “photograph” of the Moon. This sparked several questions as there was a new Moon — a fake one.
Here’s the blurry image of the Moon that was used:
A GIF of the photo-taking process:
And the resulting “photograph”:
The generous interpretation is that Samsung’s process captures blurry details in the original photograph, recognizes that it’s a moon, and then upscales them using AI. Samsung doesn’t just improve the sharpness of blurry details — it creates them. It’s at this point that I think most people would agree the resulting image is, for better or worse, fake.
The Moon images captured by Samsung’s phone seem less the result of optical data and more the product of a computational process. In other words: it’s a generated image more than a photo.
All smartphone manufacturers including Apple use computational techniques to overcome the limits of smartphones’ small camera sensors, and the mix of “optically captured” and “software-generated” data in their output has been changing with time to define what each company thinks is a perfect photo.
Ultimately, photography is changing, and our understanding of what constitutes a “real photo” will change with it. Was Samsung faking the moon pics? The simple answer is no, they are just leveraging the power of AI photography to give their users what they expect.
