The theory of the “moon conspiracy” involving the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra has not been confirmed. The smartphone is unlikely to fake photos

Yesterday, information circulated on the Web that the images of the Moon on the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra with 100x magnification could be a fake – the result of software that overlays the texture of the Moon.

At one time, a similar scandal was around the Huawei P30 Pro, but in the end it was not possible to clearly prove that there were some manipulations. In the case of the new flagship Samsung, in fact, so far we are talking only about one experiment, which proves the possibility of creating a fake, which, in turn, does not at all prove that this is how the smartphone software works.

The Input Mag journalist decided to try to get to the bottom of the truth. To begin with, he interviewed a number of specialists, and this did not give him any confidence in which of the options was correct. Forcing the smartphone to turn the lamp into the moon did not work either.

As a result, the journalist armed himself with a Sony A7R III camera and a lens with an EGF up to 600 mm. A bundle costing almost $ 5,000 should have helped figure it out. The journalist’s idea was simple: shoot the moon with a camera and a smartphone, and then compare small details, proportions, contours of craters and everything else.

The initial result on the author’s automatic settings was amazing.

As you can see, the photo on the Galaxy S21 Ultra looks incomparably better, as it contains much more detail. However, a little manipulation of the camera photo in the editor made the shots much more similar. It remains only to superimpose the pictures and see the differences.

It turned out that they actually do not exist. Against this background, the author concludes that the smartphone cannot impose textures in any way, since if he did it, taking them from some database, it would be too difficult to achieve such an identity, because all the smallest details must match.

Yes, Samsung does not hide that the photo is processed by algorithms based on AI, but this now applies to absolutely all photos. And, probably, in the case of images of the Moon, the point is only that the software makes the photos clearer and more detailed, but does not impose any textures. In the end, for the sake of such a specific scenario, Samsung would hardly have spent a lot of money and time on developing appropriate texture mapping algorithms.

It is also worth noting that in the case of images of the moon, the Samsung smartphone uses not only the general AI algorithm, but also the Scene Optimizer function. It is she who is responsible for the fact that the Moon at 100-fold approximation turns out to be so detailed. And this function does not always work, as it defines about 30 different scenarios. True, the list includes many popular ones: children, cats, birds, food, portrers, animals, street, sky, sunrises and sunsets, and so on.