Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra’s stunning moon shots exposed as fake

The impressive, even stunning, images of the Moon, published by Samsung as a demonstration of the 100x Space Zoom feature of the new flagship Galaxy S21 Ultra, have been widely circulated on the web. As it turned out, these pictures are a skillfully made fake.

Enthusiasts argue that in fact, such a fake is easy to carry out. As a demonstration, one of them posted a blurry video that suddenly turns into a very sharp image of the moon with a simple lunar texture overlay. It is noted that Huawei was caught on the same trick about a year ago.

Easy to Show. Tried it just now. Here: Even if you take an unsharp/messy photo of something that looks like a moon it snaps a moon(ish) texture on it. 🙂 simple as that. No magic hardware just clever software (combination), huawei did same year ago. pic.twitter.com/BmVhUPnq8v

— Alexi Bexi (@alextv) January 21, 2021

Raymond Wong of Input Magazine did an experiment by capturing a luminous “moon-like” object on the Galaxy S21 Ultra and applying the desired texture to it, then comparing it to a real image of the moon taken with a Sony A7R III camera for $ 4,800.

The Galaxy S21 Ultra snapshot even wins in detail. Raymond used a ping-pong ball as “Moon”.

Samsung itself explains that at 100X magnification, images are “enhanced” by the Super Resolution AI system, combining up to 20 images into one image and correcting “thousands” of details. At the same time, Samsung categorically denies the use of additional moon textures in its photos.

Source: MSPowerUser