We will always question brands who choose to alter their phone’s results instead of coming clean– whatever the reason, it’ll always be a petty move— but hold up, we think that this issue might be overblown
Numerous people have expressed their admiration for the moon photos that were captured using the Galaxy S23 Ultra’s “Space Zoom” feature. But as many of us suspected, the feature is simply an AI ruse.
At least, that is what a Reddit user who conducted a thorough investigation has determined. Be aware that the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra has a very capable camera system before you put on your tin foil hat.
One of them is capable of providing a 100x zoom level, and it is made possible by augmented 3x and 10x telephoto cameras that have digital zooming assistance from AI. But does it function as claimed in reality?
Samsung’s AI-assisted digital zoom offers Super Resolution technology. It allows the Galaxy S23 Ultra’s telephoto cameras to take clear pictures of distant objects.
Samsung refers to it as Space Zoom. And it says users can actually take photos of the moon. However, the software tricks only result in a high level of clarity in the final image.
At least one Reddit user thinks that. The user referred to the Galaxy S23 Ultra’s Space Zoom feature as being completely fake on an Android subreddit. The user also has evidence to back it up in true Reddit fashion.
The user made reference to moon images taken with the S20 Ultra and later models. The user claims that there was no evidence of fakery in the pictures taken by those phones.
However, they might just be deceptive AI techniques. The user independently tested the effect to demonstrate that the Galaxy S23 Ultra’s Super Zoom feature is a fraud.
The Redditor did this by downloading a high-resolution image of the moon and resizing it to 170 by 170 pixels. The user then used a gaussian blur to eliminate any remaining surface details.
The user moved to the opposite end of the room after placing the blurry low-resolution image of the moon on a monitor.
The Redditor used the Galaxy S23 Ultra to take a picture of the altered moon while standing back. After some processing, the phone presented a picture with a lot more detail than the one on the monitor.
As a result, the user concluded that Samsung was “leveraging an AI model to put craters and other details on places which were just a blurry mess,” though they did give the S23 Ultra credit for using multiple images to recover the otherwise lost detail.
The user made a theory that explains how AI functions after carefully analyzing the experiment. According to that, Samsung is allegedly using a particular AI model for the S23 Ultra’s Super Zoom feature.
This model is likely trained on a collection of moon images, which makes it extremely effective and able to identify the moon under any given circumstance.
The Redditor went on to say: This is not the same kind of processing that is done when you’re zooming into something else and something from those multiple exposures and different data from each frame accounts for it. This pertains only to the moon.
Given that the moon and earth are tidally locked, it is very simple to train an AI model using different moon images. When it finds a texture, all it needs to do is add some.
The user also emphasized that the AI, not the Galaxy S23 Ultra’s optics, is doing all of the work for Super Zoom. However, computational photography is not inherently bad. It is used by iPhones as well.
Not to mention, Google Pixels have gained notoriety for their use of computational photography techniques. So, is it really your fault that Samsung used AI for the Super Zoom feature?
