Owner of the most expensive Samsung phone proves that artificial intelligence can draw photos of the Moon

A Reddit user has discovered that Samsung S20 Ultra smartphones improve the detail of the moon in any photo using AI. He found out that Space Zoom technology is a marketing ploy, not a way to take a good photo of the moon at night, as it makes any low-resolution photo of the moon look beautiful.

The user took an image of the Moon from the Internet and then converted it into a picture with a resolution of 170×170 pixels.

The enthusiast then opened the low-resolution image of the Moon on his tablet, zoomed in 4 times, turned off the lights in the room, pointed his Samsung S20 Ultra at the image, used the zoom, and took a photo.

As a result, he got this photo on his smartphone. Comparison of photos — on the left is the original, and on the right is the one taken by the Samsung smartphone with the Space Zoom option.

The user explained that he was surprised when his Galaxy S20 Ultra did not take a blurry photo of the moon, but added some details to it without using the optical system and smartphone sensors, but with the help of AI.

Samsung claims that the Space Zoom feature makes it possible to take clear and vivid pictures of distant objects that are not visible to the naked eye by locking the zoom, an improved AI-based multi-frame image processing engine (minimizes noise and increases detail and sharpness), and multi-frame image processing using HDR technology (minimizes blurring and overexposure in the frame).

In reality, it turned out that Samsung was just painting over the details of the moon to get a beautiful photo.

Experts explained in comments on Reddit that to take a real photo of the Moon, you need to disable an option in the camera settings called «Scene Optimization» in your Samsung smartphone.