Yes, Apple will 'fake' zoomed photos on the iPhone 15 too - but how far will it go?

Of course, the Galaxy S23 Ultra isn't taking actual clear pictures of the moon.

- MICHAEL SIMON

You might have seen headlines this week about the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra taking so-called "fake" moon pictures. Ever since the S20 Ultra, Samsung has had a feature called Space Zoom that marries its 10X optical zoom with massive digital zoom to reach a combined 100X zoom. In marketing shots, Samsung has shown its phone taking nearly crystal clear pictures of the moon, and users have done the same on a clear night.

But a Redditor has proven (fave.co/ 3NtOlck) that Samsung's incredible Space Zoom is using a bit of trickery. It turns out that when taking pictures of the moon, Samsung's Al-based Scene Optimizer does a whole lot of heavy lifting to make it look like the moon was photographed with a high-resolution telescope rather than a smartphone. So when someone takes a shot of the moon-in the sky or on a computer screen as in the Reddit postSamsung's computational engine takes over and clears up the craters and contours that the camera missed.

In a follow-up post (fave.co/3NneXvv), they prove beyond much doubt that Samsung is indeed adding "moon" imagery to photos to make the shot clearer. As they explain, "The computer vision module/Al recognizes the moon, you take the picture, and at this point, a neural network trained on countless moon images fills in the details that were not available optically." That's a bit more "fake" than Samsung lets on, but it's still very much to be expected.