A few days ago, a Reddit post sparked fresh debate asking if the Galaxy S23 Ultra was faking its moon photos. Ever since Samsung started offering a periscope-style telephoto camera on its flagships that delivers an unprecedented 10x optical and 100x digital zoom, moon photography has been marketed as one of the phone’s hottest tricks.
What Samsung has to say about all this Digital Trends reached out to Samsung with a set of questions asking about the technical shenanigans happening behind the scenes. Here’s what the company had to say in an emailed response: In a nutshell, the Galaxy S23 Ultra is doing what almost every smartphone camera does by default — i.e., apply a layer of edits to enhance the final result. In Samsung’s case, that enhancement happens courtesy of the Scene Optimizer feature, which you can choose to disable at will.
So, is Galaxy S23 really faking it? No, it isn’t. In fact, referring to those magnified moon pictures as fake is like calling your own selfies unreal if you have applied some filters like skin smoothening, exposure adjustment, and color enhancement to make them Instagram-ready. As mentioned above, the Galaxy S23 Ultra is not engage in any kind of approximation overlay. Instead, it’s just refining the final result without any linear distortions done to the subject, which in this case is the moon.