Samsung’s Galaxy S23 Ultra Accused Of Faking Moon Photos

Samsung has been accused of faking its Space Zoom feature, one that allows the company’s flagship phones to take impressive photos of the moon without the need for additional hardware or accessories.

The feature was first announced alongside the Galaxy S20 Ultra with its 100x zoom and continues today with the Galaxy S23 Ultra.

The feature has been credited with taking some stunning zoom photos of the moon, but it’s now been suggested that Samsung’s phones are faking the whole thing.

According to a thread on the Android subreddit, the shots aren’t quite what they seem to be.

One user downloaded a high-resolution photo of the moon and then downscaled that to just 170×170 pixels. They then also clipped the highlights and applied a gaussian blur so that the resulting image was not only low resolution but almost impossible to distinguish. They then took a photo of the on-screen image using a Samsung phone. The result is so impressive Samsung has been accused of creating a fake photo.

Samsung says that it uses machine learning that has been given real moon photos to figure out what to do with a photo of a moon when presented with one. But the work being done is so severe that it’s suggested that Samsung isn’t actually showing people the moon in front of them, but rather what the phone thinks it should look like.

To put it another way, if the moon grew an extra crater, would the Samsung phone show it, or not?

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