Samsung Galaxy 'space zoom' moon photos fake? Reddit user's post sparks row

New Delhi: The Samsung Galaxy 5 series' Ultra smartphones, beginning with the 520 Ultra, are renowned for their stunning photos, particularly the zoom shots. The Galaxy 523 Ultra is the most recent addition to it. One of the most frequent shots taken with Samsung's smartphone's zoom lens is of the moon. However, a Reddit user called ibreakphotos claims that the Samsung Galaxy'space zoom' moon shots are fake.

“Many of us have witnessed the breathtaking moon photos taken with the latest zoom lenses, starting with the S20 Ultra. Nevertheless, 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. Let me explain," wrote ibreakphotos, a Reddit user, in a post.

According to the user, he reduced a high-resolution image of the moon from the internet to 170x170 pixels. He then used a gaussian blur to eliminate every detail. He moved to the opposite end of the room, turned out all the lights, and full-screened the picture on a monitor, blurring it to 170x170 pixels. He eventually used Samsung's space zoom to capture a picture of the moon.

After that, the Reddit user stated,  "Samsung is leveraging an Al 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 Al 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)."

He further continued, "This is not the same kind of processing that is done when you're zooming into something else, when those multiple exposures and different data from each frame account to something. This is specific to the moon,"