Many attempts to photograph the full moon end in disappointment. Instead of crater landscapes, the images only show a blurred object with dark spots in the middle. If you want to capture the night sky in all its glory, you either need a high-quality camera, a tripod and a knack for the right exposure time – or a smartphone from Samsung.
For a few years, some Galaxy models have been delivering moon photos whose richness of detail even full-frame cameras with huge zoom lenses overshadows. A slim smartphone should capture a demanding subject better than a specialized professional device that costs five times more than a mobile phone? That sounds too good to be true.
Apparently it is. A Reddit user aptly named ibreakfotos has proven, that his Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra adds details to the moon that do not exist in reality. He resized a photo of the moon to 170 by 170 pixels and blurred the image. He displayed the blurred pixel mass on a computer monitor, darkened the room and photographed the screen from a distance of several meters with a Samsung mobile phone.
A bright circle on a black background could be seen on the monitor, with a few flat gray areas inside. Mountains and craters can be seen on the smartphone photo, the picture shows a realistic replica of the moon’s surface – which has nothing to do with what was in front of the camera lens at the moment of recording. For ibreakfotos the matter is clear: “Samsung’s moon pictures are fake. Samsung’s marketing is misleading.”
Samsung refers to artificial intelligence
Last year, Samsung had explains that artificial intelligence is used in moon photos, which suppresses noise and enhances details for a brighter and clearer photo. If you compare the starting material of the experiment with the result, you will not only see a prettied up picture, but a completely different one.
In fact, Samsung is not the first smartphone manufacturer to think that it has to help with the moon with artificial intelligence. The Supermoon mode from the Chinese manufacturer Vivo, which creates a huge celestial body from a small point, seems almost absurd completely unrealistic level of detail. Huawei also offers a special mode for moon photos that breaks the boundaries between Image enhancement, photo editing and reality distortion blurs.
The full moon shows impressively how much smartphones edit the recordings afterwards. The built-in hardware cannot keep up with full-fledged cameras, so the manufacturers rely on software. Depending on the mobile phone model, you get different interpretations of reality, some of which differ significantly.
On some cell phones, lips can be made fuller and eyes larger, the complexion can be refined or the hairline can be shifted directly in the camera app. In contrast, moon manipulations seem harmless. A supposedly perfect celestial body at least does not convey any unrealistic ideals of beauty.