Thanks, Samsung: it’s reality, just not as we knew it
This just blew me away: it turns out that someone has come up with an experiment to prove that the photos his Samsung smartphone took of the moon, which appeared incredibly detailed as if they’d been taken them through a telescope… were faked.
In 2020, Samsung offered a “space zoom” (a 100x) for its top-of-the-line S20 model, priced at about $1,200, and since then users have been amazed at how impressive the photos they took of the moon were. Now, one user has taken an intentionally out-of-focus photo of the moon, displayed it on a large monitor, and snapped a photo of the monitor with his Samsung S23 Ultra smartphone, which produced a highly detailed image, although it was clear that the camera could not have picked up details that simply were not in the original photograph. Instead, it had simply “invented” them. An algorithm is presumably responsible for recognizing when the user is trying to take a picture of the moon, which then superimposes textures and levels of detail that were not in the original.
The idea is fascinating: using an algorithm to go where your hardware can’t. In many ways we’ve been here for a while: many terminals improve photos thanks to the interpolation of readings from multiple sensors and are, for example, able to create lighting in an image that was not there or not visible to the human eye, as…
