If you take a picture of the moon on a Samsung device, it will return a detailed picture of the moon the moon. Some people are angry about this.
The problem is that Samsung’s software fakes some details that the camera can’t really see Reddit user ibreakphotos called out to accuse the company of “faking” moon photos. The user post claims to be able to fool Samsung’s moon detection, and it went viral so much that Samsung’s press site He should have responded.
Samsung’s incredibly specialized “Moon Mode” will manipulate certain images if you point your smartphone at the moon. In 2020, the Galaxy S20 Ultra was launched with “Zoom in 100 times(It was already 30x) with this moon feature as one of its marketing ploys. The situation is still very much featured in Samsung’s marketing, as you can see in This is a Galaxy S23 adwhich shows a person with a huge telescope mounted on a tripod jealous of the supposedly unbelievable pictures of the moon that a tiny Galaxy phone can take.
We know how this feature works For two years now—Samsung’s Camera app has AI functionality specifically for moon photos—though we’ve got more details in Samsung’s latest post. This AI system can be tricked by a Reddit post claimed ibreakphotos says you can take a picture of the moon, blur and compress all the details from it in Photoshop, then take a picture of the screen, and your Samsung phone will add the details back. The camera was alleged to have made up details that weren’t there at all. Add to that AI being a hot topic, and the voices in favor of fake moon photos are starting to get louder.
On the other hand, the use of artificial intelligence to compose details is true in all smartphone photos. Small cameras make bad pictures. From the phone to the DSLR to the James Webb Telescope, bigger cameras are better. They simply take in more light and detail. Smartphones have some of the smallest camera lenses on earth, so they need a lot of software to produce reasonable quality photos anywhere.
“Computational imaging” is the phrase used in the industry. In general, many photos are taken quickly after pressing the shutter button (and even before You press the shutter button!). These are aligned into a single image, cleaned up, noise removed, run a bunch of AI filters, compressed, and saved to your flash storage as a rough approximation of what you were pointing your phone at. Smartphone manufacturers have to put out as much software as possible to solve the problem because no one wants a phone with a giant protruding camera lens, and normal smartphone camera hardware can’t keep up.
But no matter the lighting, the moon always looks the same to everyone. As it rotates, the Earth rotates and the two orbit each other; Gravitational forces put the moon into a “synchronous rotation” so we always see the same side of the moon, and it’s just “wobblingFor the Earth. If you create an incredibly customized camera mode for your smartphone that aims to photograph the Moon only, you can do a lot of fun tricks with AI.
