Samsung’s extremely niche “moon mode” will do some image processing if you point your smartphone at the moon. In 2020, the Galaxy S20 Ultra came out with “100x space zoom” (30x in fact) with this moon feature being one of its marketing gimmicks. This mode is still very much in Samsung’s marketing, as you can see in this Galaxy S23 ad, which shows someone with a telescope mounted on a giant tripod envious of moon shots. It is said to be amazing that pocket Galaxy phones can capture.
The problem is that Samsung’s software simulates certain details that the camera can’t actually see, prompting a Reddit user named ibreakphotos to accuse the company of “faking” moon images. The user’s post claimed to be able to fool Samsung’s moon detection feature, and it went viral to the point where Samsung’s news site had to take action.
We’ve known how this works for two years now – Samsung’s camera app has an AI function specifically for moon shots – although we got a bit more details in a new post. Samsung’s best. The Reddit post suggested that the AI system could be tricked, with ibreakphotos saying you could take a picture of the moon, blur and compress all the details in Photoshop, and then take a screenshot and a Samsung phone. Will add the details back. The camera will be caught inventing details that don’t exist at all. Plus, AI is becoming a hot topic and endorsements for fake moon photos are starting to appear.
However, the use of AI to create detail is true for all smartphone photography functions. Small camera takes bad pictures. From phones to DSLRs to James Webb telescopes, bigger cameras are better. They just take in more light and detail. Smartphones have some of the smallest camera lenses on Earth, so they need a lot of software to produce photos of near-reasonable quality.
“Computer photography” is the term used in the industry. Often, multiple photos are taken quickly after the shutter button is pressed (and even before the shutter button is pressed!). Those photos are layered into a single photo, cleaned, denoised, run through a series of AI filters, compressed and saved to your flash storage as an approximation of what you’re pointing your phone at.
Smartphone manufacturers need to tackle the problem with as much software as possible, as no one wants a phone with a giant, protruding camera lens and the usual smartphone camera hardware. I cannot keep up. But apart from the light, the moon always looks the same to everyone. As it rotates, the Earth rotates and the two orbit each other; gravity puts the moon in “synchronous rotation” so that we always see the same side of the moon and it just “wobbles” relative to the Earth.