Samsung appears to be faking the moon photos taken of the Galaxy S23 Ultra

The Galaxy S23 Ultra is a true champion when it comes to optical zoom capabilities. However, Samsung is once again accused of faking the very photos that bring it the most praise.

It’s a feature called 100x Space Zoom, achieved by combining the 10X optical zoom natively supported by the periscope camera with the Zoom Lock function, promising to “improve the quality of zoomed images” using AI post-processing.

Samsung doesn’t explain exactly how the technology works, but at least in some usage scenarios the results are spectacular. For example, the Space Zoom feature with allow users to get high-quality photos of the earth’s natural satellite without even needing a tripod for image stabilization.

Questioning the phone’s ability to get real photos of the Moon’s surface, some photography experts compared the “optimized” photos taken by the Galaxy S23 Ultra. Thus, the experiments they tried seem to show that the AI algorithms developed by Samsung add details not found in the original image.

The image above shows a surprisingly good shot of the Moon, Earth’s natural satellite. Only the image taken with the Space Zoom function at 100x is even more detailed than the sample taken with a dedicated camera, which is far more powerful than any smartphone camera.

Taking advantage of the fact that the Earth’s natural satellite always shows the same face, varying only the illuminated portion, Samsung engineers would have trained the AI system to add details that simply aren’t in the source image, resulting in pictures that look much better than they should. According to the allegations, when taken in Space Zoom mode, the moon photos taken with Galaxy S23 Ultra phones are not completely authentic, as users are fooled by the capture software. The “good” news is that most users will probably never sez the fake committed.