Reddit user sparks Samsung Galaxy 'space zoom' moon shots row

tech.hindustantimes.com:

The Ultra smartphones starting with the S20 Ultra under the Samsung Galaxy S series are known for their beautiful pictures especially the zoom ones. The Galaxy S23 Ultra is the latest addition to it. One of the most common shots taken using the zoom lens of Samsung's smartphone is of the moon. However, a Reddit user named ibreakphotos has claimed that the Samsung Galaxy 'space zoom' moon shots are not genuine. "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," the Reddit user said.

In order to find out if the moon shots are real or not, ibreakphotos downloaded a high resolution image of the moon from the internet and downsized it to 170x170. A gaussian blur was also applied to the downloaded picture, making sure that all the details are gone. After this, the user full screened the image on his monitor and moved it to the other end of the room and turned off all the lights. Post this, the user clicked the image of the moon using Samsung's Zoom camera.

The Reddit user then claimed, "Samsung is leveraging an AI model to put craters and other details on places which were just a blurry mess. And I have to stress this: 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)."

"This is not the same kind of processing that is done when you're zooming into something else, when those