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Reddit user ibreakphotos discovers that Samsung's 'Space Zoom' simply replaces user's moon photos with higher-res images of the moon through a clever testing process.

reddit.com/r/Android/comments/

This isn't computational photography — it's inserting imagery that simply isn't there.

@halide it _is_ there though. The phone just isn’t able to capture it.
Why should my photos that include the moon not look like what I was seeing when took the picture?

@tobiasdm @halide because this isn't adding the detail you saw, it's adding manufactured, pre-stored data that doesn't match reality. It just infills a texture. Do you want your camera to do this for say, your kids' eyes too?

Tobias Due Munk

@sdw @halide if it knew what my kids eyes looked like, probably. I’m just taking a picture of the moon though, so doesn’t have the same sentimental value to me as my kids eyes. I wish the camera sensor could capture what I saw better, but this seems like a decent workaround for now.
I can’t agree with the this-is-fake response since all photos are fake compared to what _I_ saw anyways. We need brain sensors for that 😊
I just want a picture of how I saw something. And the moon had texture.

@sdw @halide and isn’t Halide’s 3x zoom on non-Pro phones technically using pre-stored data?

@sdw @halide hehe certainly an unpopular opinion judging by all the comments 😛
But can we get closer to a technical explanation of the different type of enhanced photography we’re seeing these days? Computational photography, super resolution, machine learning. I’m not sure I see a red line of what is ok or not.

I do see a conservative “real photography” group with gate keeping and other stuff when technology and culture moves forward/on with their definition of red line changing over time.

@tobiasdm @sdw @halide
I think what Samsung does is much closer to image generation than photography. It is quite similar to something like Dall-E (but smaller in scale due to the narrower use case), with the difference that instead of writing a prompt like "Photo of the moon with a crater of the right and top right and some dark spots close to the center" you give it a low resolution photo containing the same information and the NN produces a picture.

@tobiasdm @sdw @halide imagine if instead of a camera, this were a telescope, and you were an astronomer. Photography is a form of knowledge discovery. It shouldn’t extrapolate.

@tobiasdm @sdw @halide It is fake. It 'deceives' you by suggesting that your phone captured this detail and it 'replicates' the detail from other photos. That is what fake is. You might be ok with it in this context, but you might not in others.

@tobiasdm @sdw @halide I find this is highly deceptive. It gives a false idea of what technology can do and at the same time it gives a dangerous precedent of personal computers replacing reality with simulation with zero transparency.
I wouldn't wanna put this sort of a "Santa Claus" inside the tech my children get familiar with. I would want my children to grow up with a grasp on what's going on.