Samsung ‘fake’ moon footage controversy puts spotlight on computational photography

Samsung’s “Space Zoom” feature has come under fire over complaints that images of the moon are artificially enhanced to an extreme degree.

Samsung introduced a 100x zoom feature with the Galaxy S20 Ultra in 2020, which has become a mainstay of the company’s recent flagship phones. Since its debut, Samsung has touted its devices’ ability to capture stunning images of the moon. Unlike brands like Huawei, which simply overlay such images with a PNG of the moon, Samsung says no overlays or texture effects are applied.

But on Friday, a Samsung user shared a lengthy post on the r/Android subreddit, claiming to “prove” that Samsung’s moon shots are “fake.” Their method was to download a high-resolution image of the moon, resize it to just 170×170 pixels, crop the highlights, and apply a Gaussian blur to heavily obscure the moon’s surface detail. This low-resolution image was then displayed on a monitor and captured remotely by a Samsung Galaxy device. The resulting image has significantly more detail than its source.

Samsung devices apparently achieve this effect by applying machine learning trained on a large number of moon images, making the photo effect purely computational. This has led to accusations that a texture is still functionally applied to images of the moon and that the feature is a disingenuous representation of the camera’s hardware’s actual capabilities, sparking heated debates online and even questioning the iPhone’s reliance on computational photography.