Dhe 100 is a magic number. In any case, they like to use PR and marketing departments when they want to draw attention to something. The liveliness of cars is always measured by the time it takes to accelerate from 0 to 100 km/h. Music magazines compile the best 100 albums at regular intervals. Samsung has been promoting the 100x zoom of its S series flagships for several years. The smartphone combines an optical and digital zoom, so it feels as close as possible to the object and uses the resolution of the sensor to enlarge a part of the image.
As with all manufacturers, the result is mere sensationalism. For years we have been trying out the 100x zoom in tests. In order to get a usable photo at all, the smartphone has to be held extremely still. It is best on a tripod. The result impresses for a few seconds, because you can amazingly approach the object with the camera of a smartphone. But upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that the photo is too fuzzy and fuzzy to put in an album for re-submission.
Picked up the ball
However, Samsung does not give up with the 100x zoom. When the S 23 Ultra recently came onto the market, the Koreans advertised it again. Now the moon was the center of attention. “Moon shots – with the cell phone to the moon,” writes Samsung on its website. “Experiment with the zoom on your camera. How close do you want to get the moon to you? The Galaxy S23 Ultra’s 100x Space Zoom gives you plenty of scope for experiments of this kind.” Indeed, some testers picked up the ball and snapped stunning photos of the moon. The fact that Samsung chose the moon as the zoom object is also due to the fact that the Koreans advertised the S 23 Ultra with nightography, i.e. the possibility of taking pictures at night.
But everyone knows that not only with these photos, but also with all others, the AI department of the software helps to create the sharpest and crispest possible images. Apparently it was new only for the person behind the “ibreakphotos” account and who wrote down his findings for the Reddit portal. Because he captions an article with “Samsung’s moon shots with ‘space zoom’ are fake, and here’s the proof.” And it works like this: ibreakphotos loaded a blurred photo of the moon onto the computer screen and photographed it with the Samsung smartphone.
Sharper than the template allows
The result is an image that is more detailed than the subject on the computer. So Samsung has helped, some would speak of a “fake”. The explanation: the smartphone’s software calculates and supplements details with AI support. In this case it’s quite easy because the database the AI is accessing probably contains different perspectives of good quality.
All this is not new. Not only the manufacturers of smartphones, but also of TV sets use the possibilities of AI to make the images higher resolution. For example, 8K TVs can upscale material to Full HD or 4K resolution because the software has been trained on a huge database of images and patterns. The devices then sharpen images because they can assume that they should look like this based on other images. Huawei was one of the first among smartphone manufacturers to do this. Samsung and others have been working with it for a long time.
In the case of resharpening the moon when shooting it at 100x zoom, the Koreans have now overdone it a bit. Because they explicitly advertise that you can record the moon so sharply with the flagships of the S series and want to emphasize the technical capabilities of the camera. But in reality, it’s the AI-powered software that they’re promoting with it. The AI can probably not be stopped from sharpening the moon. Unless you stop the AI from sharpening the moon.