Photo: YouTube
Reddit user ibreakphotos caught Samsung is on a scam. He empirically proved that Samsung’s flagship smartphones (at least the Galaxy S20 Ultra) are unable to photograph the moon in high quality, and the result that so impresses reviewers, bloggers and users is actually achieved by painting with the help of artificial intelligence.
ibreakphotos did a simple experiment. He downloaded a photo of the moon, resized it down to 170×170 pixels, then enlarged it to make it blurry, opened it on the tablet, turned off the lights in the room, and aimed the lens of the Galaxy S20 Ultra at the tablet’s screen. In theory, the smartphone was supposed to take a picture of a blurry image of the moon, but in the picture the image of the planet turned out to be much better – with very high detail.
What was on the tablet screen and what was photographed by the smartphone:
Photo: Reddit
It is noteworthy that while shooting in the viewfinder, the moon was blurry, and the detail appeared after processing and saving the finished image. Obviously, the artificial intelligence system, trained on professionally taken photographs of the moon, added missing detail to the deliberately blurred image. From this we can conclude that the zoom in the Galaxy S20 Ultra cannot provide a sufficiently high-quality zoom, and in order to impress users, making them believe that it is possible to shoot astronomical objects, post-processing is used.
Drawing the moon is not so difficult, because very high-quality photographs of this planet are available in open sources, but the fake zoom will be powerless when shooting other objects that the Samsung AI system is not familiar with. For example, it will not help to get as detailed pictures of passing comets, even if they are closer to the Earth than the moon.
It is worth noting that newer models of Samsung flagships (for example, the Galaxy S23 series) do not add detail to blurry photos of the moon and quite successfully cope with shooting real astronomical objects.