Samsung has a history of deceiving people on the performance of their phones.<p>>Earlier this week, we were made aware of Samsung’s Game Optimizing Service (GOS) and how it throttles the performance of games and applications. GOS decides to throttle (or not to throttle) applications using application identifiers and not application behavior. We view this as a form of benchmark manipulation as major benchmark applications, including Geekbench, are not throttled by this service.
> It’s this viral appeal that’s gotten the company into trouble. Without properly explaining the feature, Samsung has allowed many people to confuse its AI-improved images for a physics-defying optical zoom that cannot fit in a smartphone<p>I wouldn't say 'caught' or 'in trouble'. They're applying some AI blackbox to their photo tech, and the lack of transparency is annoying people so then people make viral posts like this claiming they 'caught' Samsung (when in reality it reads like an AD for Samsung).
The article does bad job of explaining itself. The problem is that the AI only works on the one moon we have, and would not detect a meteor crash or a Starlink Satelite or ISS or moon lander whatever.<p>Same as if they used the same trick with a model Coke can, and you tried to take a blurry photo a
of an insect on your can.<p>With the moon, it's especially ridiculous because no one wants Samsung's prefab moon photo, we have tons of those. They want to see the phone zoom in on what they are actually seeing, just for fun.
I don't know, maybe if you photograph the moon behind a tree, you'd like a more detailed moon.
But it's Moon "Zoom" , not Space Zoom, and it's Virtual Zoom. It's like the "Just Egg" vegan egg, but Just Egg knows you know it's not a real Egg. Samsung just keeps lying and pretending we're stupid, instead of advertising the nifty feature for what it is. That's tacky.<p>Samsung's argument is "if you can't tell, does it matter"?<p>This is new post-truth AI world.
I'm pretty sure that all big phone producers use some ML stuff to improve image quality, so I wouldn't call it "faking". But the marketing might've been a bit deceptive.<p>I wonder what people really expect though, afaik the camera has 10x optical zoom and after that up to 100x digital zoom. What does digital zoom mean? I'd say using normal scaling and other algorithms to improve quality.
I didn't buy my S23 because of this feature, but it's a neat trick and I've taken a few moon photos while out walking at night. Maybe you could argue the marketing is misleading, but AI-assisted photography isn't unique to Samsung.
I don't think its bar at all. No other tech companies are making an effort. I'm a hard-core Samsung fan, and definitely eats over Apple overpriced decades behind on function.
It's just a clickbait article, like many others written on this topic. Samsung doesn't replace the image of the moon with some pre-saved picture they already have. They take the actual real picture taken with your camera and then enhance it, whether with some AI algorithm or not - adding detail to make it look sharp. If you use a picture of a moon that's wrong(craters in the wrong place etc) then it will just sharpen that up, it won't replace it with a "correct" version of the moon. How is that different than selfie algorithms present on pretty much any phone that make you look great, smoothing out your face, removing blemishes etc.
HN is funny... first there were links [1, 2] to the reddit posts (where the person doing the investigations posted their results), and a few days later, the link to the mainstream media coverage (which is also based on the reddit post).<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35107601" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35107601</a>
[2] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35123389" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35123389</a>