Zoom function under the magnifying glass. Samsung is said to be cheating on the moon images.

With its latest smartphone, Samsung promises a super zoom camera that is supposed to improve photos using artificial intelligence. But is everything going well?

Samsung has been promoting “Space Zoom” on its flagship smartphones for several years. The latest Galaxy S23 Ultra is said to have a zoom of around 100x. However, only up to 10x is optical zoom, the rest is digital.

Digital zoom is usually useless, but Samsung promises that thanks to artificial intelligence, a decent picture is still possible. This is achieved, among other things, by means of camera software that combines several images from different lenses.

Experience reveals Samsung’s tricks

The moon is a popular subject for photos and here the photos taken with the Galaxy S23 Ultra look particularly good. But one Reddit user suspected Samsung of cheating a bit and tried it out with one an experience to prove.

To do this, he downloaded an image of the real moon, then reduced the resolution to 170 x 170 pixels and finally applied a blur filter so that no detail could be seen at all. Then he projected this image onto his screen, darkened the room and took a picture with his Samsung smartphone.

The image has been almost replaced

The result was an image of the Moon that showed craters and similar features that were not clearly present in the original subject. His conclusion: Samsung’s artificial intelligence didn’t improve the image, it simply based it on high-resolution images of the moon it was familiar with.

Because the AI ​​algorithm is trained with these images of the real moon and then applies this knowledge to image processing. The end result is probably very similar, as if the photo taken by the user was directly replaced by another photo of the moon.