as a photographer, I've asked this many many times amongst my photography friends and photo groups i belong to. because a couple of years ago it was really popular, and still is TBH, to overlay elements into images that weren't there before. like a moon. or stars. or atmosphere like fog or smoke. and it became so much and so obvious that i wondered, when does a photo stop becoming a photo and just becomes a composite? color, sharpness, subject selection. i dont think these attributes have an effect on what makes a photo as much as adding things that werent originally there. on the flip side. what about removing things. blemishes from a portrait? people in the background? unsightly objects like polls, trash cans, cars, etc? it's an interesting topic to have.
Everything should come down to a personal choice. Not everyone wants an additive camera processing and not everyone wants a subtractive camera processing. A toggle for both should be appreciated 👍🏻.
I feel that all digital cams, smartphone or otherwise, should default to 'raw' mode where there is no image processing, then give people the option of turning on assorted enhancements. Otherwise there's too much deception involved (and there's enough of that these days in all walks of life, particularly from politicians and in the media).
@@SlartiMarvinbartfast unfortunately these phones aren't made to please the consumer. By default, the most predatory, manipulative, and overbearing settings will be on because it makes investors happy.
A photo is a photo, a composite is a composite. Adjusting contrast, some colour correction, saturation, these are all things that can (and should) be done on any image, whether it's being developed in a dark room or in Lightroom. Once you start adding components from other images - again, no matter where you're processing it - then you have a composite.
As a landscape photographer (mainly), I feel that a photo represents a record of a moment in time. I tend to avoid heavy editing in my shots, my only removals are for things like dust on the sensor with some contrast and saturation tweaks. I think the real problem I have with this Samsung issue is that it's not making adjustments to what the sensor can see, it's entirely replacing the actual subject of the photo with a better version of it that might as well have just been grabbed from a google search result. I tend to feel that adjusting and replacing the subject takes it from being a photograph to being digital art. It's definitely an interesting topic and I don't know exactly where I'd draw the line between photography and digitally created art, if such a definitive line could be drawn.
He is not transparent about whether the companies are paying him, if he pays for the travels, if he pays for the hardware, if the content was seen by the brands before publishing, etc.
I have the s22 ultra and had a suspicion that something like this was going on but honestly the photos are great so I don't really care. Like you said the moon photos are awesome but the zoom works pretty well for lots of other stuff too. Thanks for the explanations!
The good thing it's that even if the moon is red, is gonna be red in the image you took, so I don't see the problem on taking crispy pics thanks to camera IA
Did anyone say if the photo of the moon is still "enhanced" with 'scene optimiser' off? Samsung are fairly up front about that feature altering photos.
When in doubt, use pro mode and shoot raw You basically get the raw image without any processing. And yes , you can still take a moon shot this way , but it's not as detailed.
i never turn scene optimizer on as i edit my photos the way i like them, that being said, yes the phone still "enhance" photos of the moon when the scene optimizer is off.
@@michaels4640 lol man. I don't even use a Samsung phone. I'm just a tech enthusiast. I'm not a fan/lover of brands. Brand loyalty is a stupid thing as companies like apple etc gaining from selling overpriced things.
I think ai integration into cameras is what will be the future selling points for smartphone cameras. It can fix overblown areas in the photo, accurately depict and light groups of people who have different skin tones. Match the image we see in the mirror with the picture we take. The possibilities are literally endless and like you said it would make us ask the question "what is a photo?"
Is it really all that much different than people who put photos into their computer and edit the crap out of them to make them look better? AI integration would basically just be AI doing all that hard work on your behalf in an instant lol
I love that he pointed out that phones do this with everything already. If I point my camera at a dog it recognizes it as a pet and optimizes the shutter speed etc to help prevent a blurry photo. If I point at food, it over saturates the tomato and lettuce. If I point it at a person, it wants to blur the background and manipulate the skin softness. But people get mad about the moon lol
@@stephaneduhamel7706 It is because the optical zoom is too little to make it possible. The Samsungs' starting point of the moon pic is a properly exposed shot. The iPhone lacks the tele lens to get to that point so it blows it out sadly.
Same here just got it 2 hours back and excited to check the moon out. But in my mind i kinda expected it to be fake, well marques proved it. No more fun anymore
You can still disable Scene Optimizer to take your moon pic, and it will still look better than iPhone. Overall every single phone brand uses AI for pictures, nothing is "real"
Marques, dude, your presentation style is remarkable. You speak so simply but eloquently, a touch more rapidly than most, but crystal clear, absolutely riveting. And you toss in just a little humor to keep it all flowing like verbal silk. Sometimes when I watch a video I silently wish it would hurry up and finish. When this video ended I wanted more. I'm definitely going to check out more of your superb work. (Also, thank you for the information 😁). You've just gained a fan.
We can actually get a real picture of the moon in pro mode, basically setting the focus to infinity, increase the shutter speed to reduce blur and also as a result, take in less light, hence reduce the brightness of the moon, and we can get a pretty serviceable and real image of the moon. S23 Ultra does all these stuff like Marques said, automatically and more like the AI stuff.
Yep taking pictures at night in pro mode you can get pics to look like what you see out of your eyes almost anyways not the ai enhanced stuff that's too bright that it looks like it's day pictures
I dont even understand all this "controversy", whats really the issue here, its not adding a fake image ontop of the real thing its just enhancing a shot like scene optimisation does for every shot... landscape, potraits pretty much every shot out of every phone is enhanced and nobody complains abt that, so what's the issue with the moon being given extra detail and sharpness?
@@aronseptianto8142 every single 100x image has extra detail added by ai , there is an ai upscaling algorithme running for all zoom shots all the time. That's what "space zoom" actually is .
Just so we're all clear, this isn't only due to the "digital age." Fujitsu film known as Fujifilm was notorious for brighter greens. So this is been a thing since we started making photos regardless of digital or chemical alterations to the imagery. Look at Ansel Adams. His photos are modified.
I used Fuji 200 asa in my Nikon F601 and won a few competitions. The pictures were excellent. No phone camera, not even my iPhone 13 pro, will win any competitions.
@@The8thSpirit Also Fujifilm were notorious for tweaking faces in Jpegs in the early days of digital . The photographers want stark detail in the West but their wives and girlfriends are not so enthusiastic. In the far East there is a tendency to want flattering photographs and my Casio ZR5100 which was restricted pretty much to the Japanese market is chock full of make up modes. This was the last of the 1/1.7" cameras and Casio were the closest to the phone performance with very fast electronics. With a lot of documentaries and research academics used Casio for affordable high speed photography and the multiple exposure 3 shots in the ZR5100 are near instantaneous and can capture moving objects without blur. The only thing that defeated it was a flying seagull. All gone now sadly. The cursor dial does not work any more but the lens dial does. Probably best to buy cameras with a spare rotary dial and best a dedicated rather than the tilt wheel button composite type.
I’m a bit perplexed by these arguments that Samsung’s scene optimizer is the same thing as boosting saturation on certain colors in a photo. I have been a working professional photographer for over 18 years now. I have seen every technique in the book from film cameras to DSLRs all the way down to smartphones… Using a 200 pixel zoomed image of the moon that is then scaled up, and AI processes to essentially “draw in the detail” of what it “thinks” you would like to see in a moon shot and still calling that a “digital photo” would be akin to you sending me a photo of a blurry moon, and letting me draw in all the detail for you realistically with a paint program and saying “yup, that’s a photograph” It’s no longer a photograph at that point. It’s a picture sure. It’s an image sure. But it’s really not right to call it a photograph anymore…
Ok, but how well does the phone take a photo of a person who’s far away? Imagine you’re at an event and there’s a celebrity and you use the phone to take a photo at 100x zoom, how will the photo look? How will the person look in the photo? Will the same processes that the phone does with the moon and landscapes also apply to people? I think that’s also a good topic to explore.
@@Tyler-lu2cj during the night? Because that's really why this is such a visible issue. When zooming, the already tiny image sensor receives even less light. during the day that's no problem, but during the night it needs this aggressive AI enhancement to not show a blurry noisy picture.
If we think about it, an actual “photo” goes through a lot of intentional post processing. as photographers we keep playing with curves, exposure balance, color calibration, white balance, sometimes even touchups. The phone is just doing “that” for the common person’s interest.
I feel it becomes disingenuous when it comes to moon shots though. Taking a photo of the moon at 100x zoom is a benchmark that most people would try out to compare cameras. With a feature like this, the phone with AI moon fakery will clearly perform better than the phone without AI moon fakery, and it has nothing to do with the camera. It's like a car that detects if you're trying to test the 0-60 time and the speedometer lies to you to get a better result.
@@alex15095 That would be the best for the consumer, since a software update would shorten the gap between the 2 products. Sadly, this is not the case, camera IS the determining factor since it's the base for the actual software to work with, less pixels less details, type of sensors and so on. I don't see why this is a problem though, since all mechanical cameras have bigger variation, more errors and result is very dependant on the state of the art and quality control of production. Even then, each piece will always be intentional since there is no such thing as randomly unbiased hardware.
You are describing the root of digital photography. I was a professional photographer in the film days and now in the digital days I can shoot pictures and never worry about missing the shot. With a film SLR the saying was "If you saw the shot, you missed it. We would have done the same things with our pictures if we could. But we were limited to darkroom tricks like nose grease to soften the focus, burning, dodging, and masking. There were also labs that would do slide and negative retouching. Picture enhancements are done with every digital camera no matter what mode you shoot in. It is the new normal for photography.
@@J4sonkempson If you shoot in RAW format then lens corrections are off by default. Then, post-process software such as Lightroom or Photoshop will try to apply it on import, but typically no. As someone who enjoys using weird lenses and chunks of glass for the effects they give, lens correction would be counterproductive for me. If you're shooting images in a compressed format such as Jpeg, then yes, lens corrections for recognized lenses are often baked into the final image.
@@J4sonkempson Most lens corrections are simply a preset either in post or in camera software, not ai. Lens correction may be “manipulation” but it’s by no means computational photography like what the video shows.
@@obomasinladen I get what you're saying, mostly, and I agree that there's *something* different about AI stepping in to create something that isn't there in the original image, but it's technically not true the way that you've worded it. Computational means a computer is stepping in to help with a process. Something like the Sony's Eye-AF falls under that umbrella, and so does mounting a flash and letting it pop off when it assumes the metering is correct. Also, if you're shooting the OG Canon 5D with settings such as jpeg, auto white balance, tint, exposure, etc all of those are pieces of computational processing. Also, by the definition of "computational photography", any editing done to the final image, whether in camera or in post-processing software, would make the final product computational. "computational photography is a digital image capture and/or processing technique that uses digital computation instead of optical processes." The definition of computational photography is really pretty vague, and really kind of new within the landscape of photography. As it is currently, it could even allow for something like that lens correction, or Phase detect AF systems to technically fall under the umbrella since they are not purely an optical process, or the entire process of taking a digital image altogether since the camera determines which colors each pixel are to render the subject, etc It's why you can take a picture of a lush green leaf and get something back from the camera that's more of a sickly bluish green, or faded green, or Sony's first few mirrorless cameras having a greenish tint to the images or slightly off skin tones that didn't match what you saw in real life.
I think what makes this thing different to me is that it's editing shapes and sharpness, not just colour and lighting. It feels like the difference between a filter, and actually manipulating the objects in the photo.
It is, if you read the entirety of the Reddit post you will see the Samsung camera basically add details of the moon that is not present in the source photo, the AI recognize the darker pixels and compare to the database and add the cradle of dunes to the final photo.
So does every smartphone today on any picture, unless you turn the features off. Sharpening, denoising, edge detection, fake bokkeh in portraits... Thats just off the top of my head. Unless you only shoot raw, the "don't process my photos"-train left many years ago.
@@SgtStinger you can still shoot raw with lightroom im fairly sure. Also, since the iphone brought that feature back, a lot of manufacturers will/have done
I've been taking photos of the moon with my s22 ultra for almost a year now and I guess I always just accepted this, like...if you go look at the photo you just took you can literally watch it turn into the final photo with all the enhancements. It sits there loading for a second and then boom, moon. Whether or not that is an issue for people is not my position to say, but it's been pretty obvious that it's the case even at an average end user level.
@@mikkliish well regardless if it does or not, it heavily edits the raw photo to make it look miles better than the actual data being captured. So however it achieves the final photo, it's still heavily altering it regardless of AI or not.
I think its good that the AI improves the photos at this extent, as everyone is not a good editor, so photos straight out of pho e which looks damn good is a good thing.
Oh. I was wondering why the pictures you shared looked better. I immediately turned scene optimization off once I got my 22U. I hate phone camera over editing, so I always turned that stuff off and have always taken pictures of the moon that looked good enough to me, and still very impressive. Never knew that setting made it look better lol
Personally I like all the post processing. Although I'm also the kinda person who doesn't give a crap about color accuracy when it comes to calibrating a new TV and I don't care in the least about a flat or balanced sound when it comes to headphones. I get all that stuff has a place, especially so in a professional setting but as a consumer I want all the vivid and vibrant presets, all the V shaped audio my headphones can put out and all the post processing my S23 can handle.
As a person who daily drives both iPhone and s22 ultra, I get your point. I'd still say that Samsung has the best zooming phones in the industry despite all the scene optimization. In daily use 100x is impractical but I find myself taking photos with 30x zoom very often and the photos turn out fairly good. Not to mention the portraits are really good in Samsung and the video quality is better than it has ever been.
I do get where the criticism comes from for this, but people always say that the camera is just as much software as they are hardware and this is just one more expression of that fact
anything is good if all you use to watch those is your tiny phone screen. I still use a S20+ and thats the shittiest camera I have ever used, and the biggest problem is how it destroys real view by overdrawing and oversharpning algorhytms. It is no longer a photo, its an image.
I took a moon shot with an S22U last October and it looks pretty much the same. It even had leaves in front of the moon. So it's nothing new. Someone on Reddit had tested it with blurred shots of Jupiters moons and they too (according to this person) became sharper but were not replaced by Earths moon.
Yeah that is the most important test imo. The same test works on many different blurry moons where it uses AI to add detail. The end result is still those moons. So while you aren't getting a 100 percent raw moon photo like you would with a dslr and telescope rig, it is still impressive tech. Albeit perhaps marketed a bit poorly.
@@nowondr they should have marketed as an AI enhancment. Rather than that they specifically trained a model to detect moon and marketed it as an 100x zoom feature
@@tamzidahmed9706 agreed. all I was saying was attempt to clear up what many assumed to be "overlaying images". It is still not a genuine RAW photo with AI enhancement by any means, but at the same time no smartphone moon pic ever will be simply due to the physics needed to zoom in optically that much on the moon. the size of lens required is too big for a smartphone. so the solution here is AI. better to have the feature and not use it/turn it off than to not have it at all imo. I don't disagree that it should have been marketed more transparently, though
I wish I could post a photo here but zooming into a street light with a s22 ultra/ s23 ultra allows you to see the bulbs through the bright light and while reasonably far away. So while this may be largely AI. Whatever Samsung is doing with the camera is still very impressive/ capable (In terms of adjusting for exposure, stabilization, ect).
it doesnt have anything to do with ai. You are just able to get really close to an overexposed object, so phone decreases shutter time to compensate. Which happens with any lens any time.
The reddit post experiment was already done by a Korean youtuber way back when the S20 Ultra came out. Samsung has always done this (and were pretty transparent about it) and in response to the controversy they explained that the 'fake moon' was just a byproduct of their computational photography engine since it does the same processing procedure like all the other photos. Dope video about the topic, though.
I was confused as to why it was so controversial. I thought we knew that smartphone photos were heavily processed images due to the limitations of a tiny camera and lens.
Because it’s misleading. It was giving the impression that you can take photos at 100x with that much detail when in actual fact it will very much depend on if what they’re using recognises the image and so can overlay it with detail that is correct.
@@Drenwickification maybe I'm too deep in my tech bubble because I didn't feel misled at all that 100x zoom on a phone is blurry digital zoom + whatever the AI can make of it.
@@Drenwickification ughh. This was all exolained in samsung's webpage. Turn off scene optimizer if you don't want that. Zooming in, the phone tends to use a lot of AI to clarify things such as text and lines. That is how samsung got text from far away still readable.
@@mma0911It’s definitely more of a problem outside the tech bubble. Compare comments on these videos to the ones on TikTok, shorts, Twitter and Instagram and you’ll often see the voices explaining the tech here drowned out in a sea of people that seem to have been completely fooled or settled into the tribalism of rooting for their preferred brand. Sadly, tech today might as well be magic to the average person.
I think this really comes down to what your definition of "fake" is, versus understanding that there's a lot of post processing going on. I wouldn't say the pictures are "fake" like many clickbait titles and articles are saying, but there's definitely A LOT of post processing and software based changes to give you the final result
You don’t need twist this dude. This Samsung AI has been training on a series of know moon photo as the moon will always look the same from almost any where. It’s literally spitting out a “moon” image when fed anything that looks like the moon. In the Reddit experiment a moon photo is blurred to look like a glowing orb and set on a computer screen. The phone enhances the ord into a moon.
@@tech4now_ Correct. It’s not about whether it’s faked or not, it’s the fact that it washes the individuality of your photo. So in essence there is no point in taking it. Fake or not, it feels gimmicky. If it were actually enhancing your photo, yes - all of the above to post processing. But it’s more like auto-correcting.
If I take a picture of a bright light and then draw details all over it and tell you "look at this cool picture! I took a picture of a bright light and all these details appeared " 🤔 sounds pretty fake to me
@@TLRB86 That's not what it's doing though. It's using software and a shit tonne of post processing to enhance the details that it already knows are there through recognition. Fake would be if you could take a picture of a literally perfectly smooth light bulb in the dark miles away and have it come out looking like the moon. What Marques showed was blurry versions of what the software was able to already recognise as the moon. I think what people are forgetting is that for a picture to even be able to be taken at 100x zoom, the amount of software involved to even make the picture steady enough that it doesn't just come out a huge blurry mess is absolutely ridiculous. If the zoom was fully "fake" though, it wouldn't work in all the other situations it's been proven to work in on completely random objects and landscapes. Heavily, heavily edited, post processed and AI enhanced, yes. Fake? No. Otherwise with that logic, any photo that is not entirely original and has absolutely zero post processing could also be classed as fake, on any phone
I took a moon shot around 5PM with my S23 Ultra, and I noticed it turned the blue sky black. I assumed one of 2 things had happened, either the phone turned the shutter speed all the way up to expose the moon correctly, or it did what Huawei was accused of. Glad to see a proper explanation on what's going on with the processing
I guess if it turned the exposure right down that would do it too depending on how much light there was in the blue sky. But 5pm sounds reasonably dark at this time of year for most places.
Lol Samsung is doing it the right way. Use pro mode and you can actually capture a good moon shot with it. It's just with the auto mode it's more like it is doing some processing (that literally every smartphone does even pixels and iphones...
Good topic to shine a light on. Especially as deepfakes become more common and it becomes harder to tell if a photo or video is real. It’s problematic when you don’t know if and how an image has been “optimized” or changed, and if it’s passed off as unaltered.
The only unaltered image would be a raw file, which is impossible to view - when you look at a photo on the back of the camera you took it on, you get a jpeg preview, when you look at the files in Explorer/Finder, you get the embedded jpeg, when you see it in Lightroom/Photoshop, before you start doing anything to it, it's been processed from a raw file to something we can see as a picture, according to some prameters. We basically never get to see a truly unaltered image, eveytime we see a photo it's been processed according to someone's or sometihng's interpretation of the data captured by the sensor. And every debate on the matter is just everyone's different level of tolerance to alterations. Some people will only accept the image as it's been processed by whatever raw processor gets used, others will say it's fine to adjust it in order to have it represent what they themselves were seeing when taking the photo etc.
@@houserhythm it can be done using another camera app which can utilise all the cameras but doesn't have these enhancements, because these are mostly not hardware but software depemdent
Well the point is, that Samsung is actually NOT creating more information than there was before. It simply uses AI, to set the settings to an optimal angle and boost the details already given. Also, Max Weinbach, a co. worker of Android Police, who also is a famous Samsung whistleblower, claims, that after intense searching, he has not found any source of texture in the APK of the Samsung Camera App. By the way, this whole Samsung-fake-moon thing started with the S21 Ultra and was later prooved to be fake. And I don't understand you either, because I can not see any more detail on MKBHD's moon picture than on the original. Especially when comparing the experiment to the reddit-users results.
I remember hearing lawyers argue back and forth about this in a case concerning the admission of a zoomed in photograph as evidence. the argument was that when you pinch and zoom a photo on a phone it isn't the same as taking a magnifying glass over the photo, the phone and software actually manipulate the photo when you pinch and zoom, trying to fill in details, enhacing blurriness, etc. so one lawyer was arguing the pinch and zoom photo should not be admissible because it manipulates the photo. but all smartphones manipulate the photo zoom or no zoom with all of these kinds of tricks, so maybe something that is just a shadow when the AI software tries to improve it it makes the shadow look more like a gun when really it's only just a shadow.
I honestly don't see that much wrong with using ai visualizations to improve picture quality. The bar for quality keeps going up, and it is impossible to get a better picture quality than a competitor without doing some form of post processing/enhancements. Either way, it is very impressive to say the least!
@@Nickie102 what's wrong with that? Don't we all want blue sky and greener grass. You are literally questioning people why people edit photos and why editors spend hours to edit photos....
Really appreciate the breakdown of what's happening with this nifty image processing and the acknowledgement of both the Reddit user who blew up earlier and your earlier short, which being a short could have just slid under most folks' radar.
That's the whole reason DSLRs and mirror-less cameras will never be obsolete. No matter how good the phone cameras become. Nothing beats a larger sensor and changeable lenses which can give you the raw image. So that the photographer can interpret it according to what he thinks is right for the image. And not the computer deciding for you what's good.
I think everyone's getting me wrong. My main point for my argument is that I can change lenses and at least I have control over the saturation and temperature of the image whereas phone cameras do that for me. Of course there is computer and AI stuff in the mirror less and DSLRs but I still have the control over how the end product is going to look like. I have that extra room to edit and choose. Phone cameras don't have that extra room. And the camera tech and the phone cameras tech are getting better (both) at an equal rate. Therefore, these will never be obsolete. That's what I'm trying to say. Phone cameras can never replace large sensor cameras.
@@jagpreetsingh3221a considerable number of phones nowadays offer raw format output and manual mode though? So doesn't that mean you can also have the customizations that a DSLR gives you? I mean, I agree that phone cameras will never replace DSLRs, but that's just because both are fundamentally intended for differing use cases.
I use 100x zoom to read far away boards when on an airport. It does sharpen the text more than they actually are. Text looks different on the 100x zoom than it does when you go closer and see for yourself.
@@humanshieldz Because people didnt know about it. Yes, they weren't hidding it, but they didn't publicallly call it out either. People had higher expectation when Samsung phones was able take good moon pictures with it's own hardware, well turns out it wasnt that good before post processing kicks in.
@@luaerve I think they documented it on their Korean website how it's done so while I think they didn't emphasize on it, they didn't hide it either. They put it out there for people to go see it. Every company does things like that. They probably thought it's common sense, given that it's AI. Like Apple's background blur for video, it's not real either But Apple didn't explicitly said its fake blur, it's just common sense.
Perfectly well said, even I noticed this when shooting from my S23U that Samsung uses AI to aggressively Improve details in any picture you take zoom or not. But for sure its not faking it because i tested it out with a perfect example and it blew my mind so all S23U users can try this. Write something with a pen on a small piece of paper and stick it on the wall, now walk far away until you cant see whats written on it, and wald farther away till your 100x zoom could barely/definitely not pick up the writing, now click the picture. Don't be Suprised to see the text clearly visible post processing of the image. Happened with me when i was taking picture of a far away plate of the room name in a hospital, i was shocked to see hand written text next to it out of no where.
@@alireza5218 Do you know that the moon you see on the viewfinder is what the camera actually sees ? This is still a 240mm lens , it can very much see the moon
Good to see you throw a light in this aspect of AI Photography because people forget that nowadays everything is pre edited for us which is good, but the moon being the easiest thing to edit out got a whole lot of attention for nothing, glad Samsung has it already detailed somewhere
I have the Fold 4. Gave up my S22 Ultra which I loved taking pics of the moon with for the big display. I've taken a couple pics of the moon with my Z4 and I'm still impressed with the pictures I get of the moon. Now I think I know why. Thanks for the heads up.
Was waiting to see how you would react to that reddit post. Good to see you owned your mistake and made a clarification video on it. That's why you are one of the best 👊
@@manhanho962 not at all, the reddit user claimed it was fake, by definition, the reddit user is incorrect. It's a lot more nuanced, which MKBHD delved into. Where is this "$$$$$" you claim?
@@zod4365 clearly u don’t understand this business lol, but I could show u something but nah will be wasting my precious time with you , not worth it 🫣
Feels like phones are doing Lightroom/capture one editing for us. The moon might be the most extreme example, but none of it feels that different from editing that's been done since the early days of film. The act of capturing a still image in and of itself has always been unreal in a way.
"This computers interpretation of what it thinks you'd like reality to be." Nailed it. I always get a chuckle when people say- it's right from my phone- no editing. Well... there's a ton of editing- you just didn't have a say in any of it.
That's some good clarification. We all expected some software to be involved however, I think Samsung still done an amazing job with it. They did not go overboard with intense software modifications to the photos I mean this 100x stuff has been since S20 ultra and is now been found out about what the reality is. Also, them making a forum on their website to explain how it works is also nice.
It's very impressive indeed the amount of detail I can get taking photos of ground objects in my S23 Ultra is insane, I fly all the time and I just spend large amount of time just taking photos of the buildings or sceneries or islands that my iPhone 13 Pro can't even do close to that tbh
@@TRX25EX exactly! It's very annoying that people call it a gimick tbh people without this phone or a 100x feature say this. If they had that camera system of 100x zoom then they would realise it's actually really fun!
I would make the argument that these aren't photos anymore. Photos are the result of light being captured by a photosensitive material, such as film, in case of analog, or CMOS or CCD sensors, in digital. They're basically a copy of what light *did* once you took that specific photo. Now these started with a photo, but the modifications the AI made clearly don't exist, they're not a representation of what the camera saw at that moment, they're the computers interpretation now. Now with that, I'd say that now they're just edited pictures, not photos, because they're no longer a copy of what reality might've looked like to the camera, but as you said, the interpretation of a computer regarding how we want reality to look like.
There is no doubt that this phone takes fantastic photos, it's one of the reasons why I bought one. I didn't test it extensively yet but I already knew something fishy was going on. I took a picture in my clear living room, where I zoomed in on my partner and cat on the other side of the room (mind, I don't live in castle so I didn't zoom in THAT much), and the pictures didn't look very clear. It made me wonder at that point why people were able to get a super clear picture of the moon. Very interesting to see this process of AI going on in my phone. Thanks for the explanation!
Great video on this subject. I had Scene Enhancement on on my S21 Ultra for a bit but could start to subtly tell some things looked "off" to me so I disabled it. Been shooting weddings and events professionally for almost 15 years so it's pretty easy to spot manipulation in software compared to just optics. Great nuanced video on this subject as it's something we'll all be having to live more with in the future as smartphones and software continue to improve.
You figured out how to disable the "moon enhancement", why didn't you show a photo with scene optimizer disabled? Would have been nice to see as a comparison.
Because when the photo still comes out showing detail on the moon, it ruins the theory. Take a photo with the moon in full manual, drop it into snapseed and edit contrast/boost structure, and you get extremely close to the "fake ai photo".
Samsung says the Galaxy Camera applies a deep learning-based AI detail enhancement engine (Detail enhancement technology) at the final stage to effectively remove noise and maximize the details of the moon to complete a bright and clear picture of the moon. I think if it's just improving the image and not replacing it with an overlay or something fake that's fine.
OP here. First of all, props for how you opened the video. One reason why you maybe weren't to replicate my findings in your example is because: 1) The moon image you have loaded on your monitor is huge. I used the 170x170 pixel blurred image which is linked in the reddit post in it's original size, not full screened. Literally 170x170 pixels 2 ) It needs to be pitch black. I'm not sure how dark your space was, but in my own testing, I've found it reliably works when there is very little to no light, no reflections etc. Try doing it at night. 3) Zoom levels from 40-70x worked well for me, but I only used those because of my distance from the monitor and the apparent size of the image on it 4) Did you have the scene optimizer mode on? I'm writing this only to tackle a comment I sometimes see, which is that someone wasn't able to replicate my findings, and it's usually one of those things. Also, since then, I've done even more tests (as requested by the community), which show what's happening in more detail. For me, the main issue isn't the discussion about AI/ML, rather the lack of clarity given to consumers what their software (image processing) does. I would be completely fine with the moon mode, if it was explicitly stated that it uses a neural network to fill in the details from other moon photos where optics cannot resolve them. With a statement like that - it's completely fine. It's obfuscating that is the issue, and I find the language in their Korean article to be obfuscatory. I am very liberal in that regard and don't consider only the raw output to be "pure", as can be judged by my own work.
Props to MKBHD for opening with "I was wrong. Time to own it." I always felt like the Samsung coverage here was a bit biased, but uh... well here we are. Good on MKBHD.
The photo is fake, yeah, I always knew that, does that change anything? Is the moon different from the AI ? I honestly don't care. I have a DSLR camera with a 100x optical zoom, and the end result is basically the same.
Side Note : Night photography on these flagship cameras have almost exactly the same thing of adding details that are not there, But it's very subtle and uniformly spread over the entire frame not like the moon thing that's focused on a specific object. Same thing (almost)
Good video. I’m experiencing this right now with 14 Pro. The photos I take never look the same from what I’m looking into the camera app live. Under saturate, HDR gets too heavy, it’s annoying. Specially because if you press and hold to see the live frames, it’s completely different, another photo. And if you select another frame, boom, all this post-processing bs goes always. I guess we’re in that state where it’s getting out of control and they are doing too much
Well, you aren't buying a telescope, you're buying a phone. I really dont see a problem with this, as long as its an actual photo and not an overlay or sth like that. Obviously the zoom works, you can try it on anything else, and it will take a decent picture of that thing, even if its very far. Eitherway, to each their own.
That's what I was going to say. Regardless, I can still 100x zoom onto a sign that I can't read with my own eyes and snap a photo, sure it might process the photo to make it sharper or whatever, but I can now read the sign lol it's not overlaying a Google image of that sign 😂
@@chrishunter293 you can buy a camera, but there have been many time living where I live, being out on a walk or sth, that I see an amazing scenery, and the cameras of the s22+ are insane. They really capture the vividy that my eyes see. Not to mention that a decent camera can cost from 500-600€. Most people dont have that kind of money for a hobby.
@@fioreloe.9256 that 500-600 Euro camera can't keep up with the S22+. You need a 3k Euro DSLR to keep up somewhat. Ofcourse, lense advantages are always true, but on a dynamic range + fidelity standpoint, you really can't match a modern smartphone flagship with a budget camera anymore. You really need some good gear.
To me, making the moon look clearer and sharper using scene optimiser and AI is the same as taking a portrait mode photo with fake bokeh. It is there to make photos look better and please the viewer's eyes, no biggie.
No it's literally a fake moon plastered over the real one in order to give a sense of a clear moon. Almost like a sticker. I have the S23U and right before you take the photo is probably the real photo of how it should look and let me tell you, it ain't pretty.
I like that Sony stepped out of the game with the Xperia Pro series. It's harder to take "better" point-and-shoot pictures than on an iPhone or a Samsung smartphone, but that's what makes it usable by professional photographers/videographers. If only they were a little less expensive...
@@tylerkirby6413 I'm paraphrasing him : Samsung ,Google and Apple are known to use phones Computational power to enhance the image after it is taken and produce a highly modified *better looking photo. But sony in their thousand dollar phones is outputing the real photo as seen in the frame which is more natural and sometimes not as contrasty and sharp as apple's or Google
This is such a non-issue. It's not a fake moonshot (like Huawei), like the reddit user claims. This is just computational photography. It's the same thing that enables bokeh portrait shots. The camera still recognizes the moon (even if it's blurred on a screen), and the phone does its moon specific processing. Why is anyone surprised that computational photography can be tweaked for specific objects when it does the same thing for portraits?
Great video, Marques! Your analysis of Samsung's camera situation was spot on. However, I'm curious to know your thoughts on how Samsung can improve their software processing to match up with their impressive hardware. Do you think they need to invest more in AI and machine learning to achieve this? Keep up the awesome content.
@@4nlimited3dition_4n3d because hardware and software must work together to produce a good image. computational photography needs an actual, y'know, photo - and as data captured through image sensors gets better, so does the ability to process and therefore improve it to produce a good final photo.
Hey Marques. Enjoyed the video as always. Just a quick input: the moon wobbles on a monthly basis which basically means not every full moon looks the same (this is called libration). Sooo - an experiment that lasts a couple of months where couple of full moon shots are taken from the space zoom and compared could be a good test as well.
The amount of _behind the scenes magic_ you guys do when making a video is just amazing. I always look forward to spot a glimpse of it when a new video comes out!
Definitely noticed this happening on my Fold4 too. At max zoom (30x digital zoom on a 3x lens) the moon looks surprisingly crispy and detailed, much more so than I would expect from a 3x optical zoom.
Same thing on my S20+... But anyway it was obvious that this required software, it's pure logic. I didn't think there would be there any need for a detailed experiment for this...
Right, the resolution of these smartphones is simply limited in diffraction no matter what crazy zoom factors manufacturers come up with. They can increase the focal length (or support digital zoom) as far as they want, it won't change much with a small lens.
well the point is, that Samsung is actually NOT creating more information than there was before. It simply uses AI, to set the settings to an optimal angle and boost the details already given. Also, Max Weinbach, a co. worker of Android Police, who also is a famous Samsung whistleblower, claims, that after intense searching, he has not found any source of texture in the APK of the Samsung Camera App. By the way, this whole Samsung-fake-moon thing started with the S21 Ultra and was later prooved to be fake. And I don't understand you either, because I can not see any more detail on MKBHD's moon picture than on the original. Especially when comparing the experiment to the reddit-users results.
I definitely got vibes of Michael from VSauce during your closing monologue 🤣 I got an S23 Ultra about 4 weeks ago now and I love it, I've also been interested in photography and dabbled for my own recreation. And I'm loving what I can do with the S23 Ultra, I think you do still have to have an eye for good photography, in terms of composition, the phone can't do that part for you, but I'm having great fun adding to my own portfolio... but then, is it my own portfolio? Or is it now a collab between my composition and the S23 Ultra's processing?!?!?!
Kinda sucks that this is the way it is but it's also pretty neat on the tech side. Try zooming in on text from far away. It's interesting to see how the AI acts. Sometimes it will get it right sometimes it will give you random characters from other languages.
I LOVE how mkbhd now ends his videos with this segment or some sort of phrase or metaphor, it's sooooo nice for some reason and well thought out, The intro and the content is Top of the line ofc, don't get me wrong Love ur vids!!!! Also my favorite camera are the iPhone's, because of social media integration and better video and extremely consistent reliable detailed fast photos, LOVE IT!!
Photo-graphy is the art of drawing with light, or graphically capturung photons true to what is actually there. AI enhancement can be interesting, I'm not against it, but ultimately I find it more rewarding to stay true to the original, faithfully channeling light using lens, aperture, shutter speed and exposure medium.
If you want originality then simply use Samsung's expert raw mode it's as simple as that. Samsung has given every option and it's up to you which one you prefer...
As you can see not everyone knows this, even people that are tech minded and come to watch tech video's didn't know this. You can read couple comments in this comment section that people bought the phone cause of that excellent PR marketing zoom. What do you think of none tech people getting fooled by it? Yes, they have no clue and think it was really that good. This is the issue with this.
Good one Marques! all brands have some AI processing happening on their pictures, and theres nothing wrong with it. It saves normal people the hassle and provides results that are ready to share. Said that I would like to see what this moon pic looks like in RAW?
What's wrong with it is taking it too far. Some color correction, sharpening and high dynamic range stuff is fine. But when a neural network creates information that wasn't there before it is no longer a photo.
@@chrisidema well the point is, that Samsung is actually NOT creating more information than there was before. It simply uses AI, to set the settings to an optimal angle and boost the details already given. Also, Max Weinbach, a co. worker of Android Police, who also is a famous Samsung whistleblower, claims, that after intense searching, he has not found any source of texture in the APK of the Samsung Camera App. By the way, this whole Samsung-fake-moon thing started with the S21 Ultra and was later prooved to be fake. And I don't understand you either, because I can not see any more detail on MKBHD's moon picture than on the original. Especially when comparing the experiment to the reddit-users results.
@@chrisidema Every single Zoom Camera on every Phone that is not using a 3x or 5x optical zoom is "creating" new information. If you take a 10× zoom photo with an Iphone the phone is neither capable of doing a 10× optical zoom nor can it just "zoom" into a normal picture because that would look awfull so what does it do? It enhances the photo in a way the 10× zoom looks acceptable, it creates information that it did NOT capture on the OG photo.
When I started seeing pictures of a super crispy moon I was really starting to believe Samsung got phone photography right, now I just realize phone photo processing has a way of showing us things we want to see, except when we open up the front facing camera…
Well the point is, that Samsung is actually NOT creating more information than there was before. It simply uses AI, to set the settings to an optimal angle and boost the details already given. Also, Max Weinbach, a co. worker of Android Police, who also is a famous Samsung whistleblower, claims, that after intense searching, he has not found any source of texture in the APK of the Samsung Camera App. By the way, this whole Samsung-fake-moon thing started with the S21 Ultra and was later prooved to be fake. And I don't understand you either, because I can not see any more detail on MKBHD's moon picture than on the original. Especially when comparing the experiment to the reddit-users results.
Glad you made a video about this. Saw a TH-cam short about it a few days ago and didn’t really understand what he meant. Thought Samsung was just using an image of the moon and not taking a picture of it at all. Something’s take more than a minute to explain 😆
I think there's a big misconception here. Everyone seems to think Samsung's AI is adding detail that doesn't exist, when in fact, they are just using a best guess "Convolution Kernel", well, multiple passes and multiple guesses, but still. I just uploaded a video that explains the math and science behind this, with examples, explained by an engineer. You can check the video out if you want, but the bottom line is that the images are far from fake and Samsung is definitely not creating detail from nothing as most people suspect. That said, I can see why people would assume this and it's no fault of their own.
I knew it when I had the S21 Ultra. The moon shot was so consistent that I questioned whether it was actually a photo. The moon face never changes, just the phase and color. I like alliteration at the end. A bit of a CGP Grey style alliteration
So I have an S22 ultra and I knew something fishy is probably up with the moon photos, so I tried clicking pictures in Pro (manual) mode and played around in lightroom. Despite my best efforts, I couldn't get the pictures to look as good, but I was still impressed with what I could get without the AI processing. Samsung could've left it that way and it would've been impressive enough, but yeah. What is a photo?
I like how it works, to me it doesn't feel fake, but rather the camera and the software are doing exactly what they need to do. They make the moon look better like no other smartphone camera does. Because without it you get a blurry overexposed orb on any smartphone camera. Now if this was a full DSLR or Mirrorless real serious camera doing this stuff, I'd be concerned, but for a smartphone I think it's perfectly fine! S23 Ultra ROCKS!
@@basketcase1235 That's true even of regular photos. Samsung especially, but everyone in general, try to make the picture pop, look better than what your naked eye would recognize Also, in general, nothing is actually "there" Everything is a product of lighting, perspective etc. A picture is always in the eye of the beholder
What is capturing then, applying filters doesn't consider it 'capturing'? Is it the amount of filtering that would classify it 'capturing'? Or is it raw photos only?
Out of all of this, and the discussion about how phone cameras work, my greatest takeaway from this is "I need to invest in a separate, dedicated camera, so I can trust that my picture isn't being altered unless I actively make the choice to alter it, otherwise I can basically call every photo I take 'AI generated content' rather than a real photograph". Whee. I love our megacorp-steered technology landscape. It's just the bestest.
I mean, it's what people wants. What I really hate about it is the fact that all companies are being dishonest about it, and that it's not intuitive to turn it the AI off, if it's even possible. But yeah, prettier photos is not exactly what I'd call a "bad thing".
What does it do at 100x zoom on something it doesn’t recognize? Like a graffiti painting or a person where it doesn’t know what to make it look like? I think that would be a better test of the camera than taking the exact same limited photo as what the developers use to advertise with…
These tech reviewers are not doing that because they know that would go against their narrative. It has actually been shown that the AI works to enhance the detail of every object taken from far away, not just the moon photo. That shows superiority of Samsung software. But instead of pointing that out, they are all quivering making a big deal out of nothing.
@@novadon4729 Samsung isn't unique for using upscaling and optimization, nearly every single phone out there has it. Not to mention how easily available the software is to upscale or enhance in post production.
Clearly explained by MKBHD as always. Also, feel like the moon thing is being blown out of proportion - the phone remains solid with the superb camera, video and zoom - an AI enhanced feature is not really "fooling", but maybe could have been added as an AI feature instead.
that's an appreciation video for the real 'photographers' out there, who really sweat out, during the days & nights to capture some real pictures of the world, using Manual Mode 😉
as a photographer, I've asked this many many times amongst my photography friends and photo groups i belong to. because a couple of years ago it was really popular, and still is TBH, to overlay elements into images that weren't there before. like a moon. or stars. or atmosphere like fog or smoke. and it became so much and so obvious that i wondered, when does a photo stop becoming a photo and just becomes a composite?
color, sharpness, subject selection. i dont think these attributes have an effect on what makes a photo as much as adding things that werent originally there.
on the flip side. what about removing things. blemishes from a portrait? people in the background? unsightly objects like polls, trash cans, cars, etc?
it's an interesting topic to have.
Everything should come down to a personal choice. Not everyone wants an additive camera processing and not everyone wants a subtractive camera processing. A toggle for both should be appreciated 👍🏻.
I feel that all digital cams, smartphone or otherwise, should default to 'raw' mode where there is no image processing, then give people the option of turning on assorted enhancements. Otherwise there's too much deception involved (and there's enough of that these days in all walks of life, particularly from politicians and in the media).
@@SlartiMarvinbartfast unfortunately these phones aren't made to please the consumer. By default, the most predatory, manipulative, and overbearing settings will be on because it makes investors happy.
A photo is a photo, a composite is a composite.
Adjusting contrast, some colour correction, saturation, these are all things that can (and should) be done on any image, whether it's being developed in a dark room or in Lightroom. Once you start adding components from other images - again, no matter where you're processing it - then you have a composite.
As a landscape photographer (mainly), I feel that a photo represents a record of a moment in time. I tend to avoid heavy editing in my shots, my only removals are for things like dust on the sensor with some contrast and saturation tweaks. I think the real problem I have with this Samsung issue is that it's not making adjustments to what the sensor can see, it's entirely replacing the actual subject of the photo with a better version of it that might as well have just been grabbed from a google search result. I tend to feel that adjusting and replacing the subject takes it from being a photograph to being digital art.
It's definitely an interesting topic and I don't know exactly where I'd draw the line between photography and digitally created art, if such a definitive line could be drawn.
“It is this computer’s interpretation of what it thinks you’d like reality to look like”
This hit me.
Nice
"The power of AI" turning everything in virtual reality
Absolute jewel of a takeaway!
This. Just this.
Same
I saw this coming, and now I respect Marques’ integrity even more
@Don't Read My Profile Photo Ratio bot
Ahahah he only did this because $$$$ talk’s always high 😂😂😂
Only option he had if he wanted to keep his channel with same viewers
@@manhanho962 L
He is not transparent about whether the companies are paying him, if he pays for the travels, if he pays for the hardware, if the content was seen by the brands before publishing, etc.
Me too
I have the s22 ultra and had a suspicion that something like this was going on but honestly the photos are great so I don't really care. Like you said the moon photos are awesome but the zoom works pretty well for lots of other stuff too. Thanks for the explanations!
The good thing it's that even if the moon is red, is gonna be red in the image you took, so I don't see the problem on taking crispy pics thanks to camera IA
@@alankin2316 gotta get that sweet Reddit karma and upvotes
@@592Johno ew, thank god this isn't Reddit 🙏
Just google photos of the moon in 4k and you get better quality photos 😂
@Giuliano bardecio
Yeah, or if you see beautiful ocean, just google it. there's no need to picture it.
Did anyone say if the photo of the moon is still "enhanced" with 'scene optimiser' off? Samsung are fairly up front about that feature altering photos.
Yes, it's tied to scene optimization. He says so in the video.
When in doubt, use pro mode and shoot raw
You basically get the raw image without any processing.
And yes , you can still take a moon shot this way , but it's not as detailed.
I've always had it off so I was surprised to see it so crisp in the video
i never turn scene optimizer on as i edit my photos the way i like them, that being said, yes the phone still "enhance" photos of the moon when the scene optimizer is off.
I shot everything with the scene optimizer off. Done so for years..🤷🏾♂️
Many points to marques for 1. Admitting his “mistake” and 2. For dropping alliteration bars at the end. Dope video well done
The end was very Vsauce like.
@@jan.tichavsky as was the video tagline - "What IS a photo?" *cue Vsauce music
bec he was mentioned in that reddit post
He just scared losing subscribers..
@@cockiller4401 aint no way Marques losing subscribers over a 30 second short💀
Finally somebody accurately explains what's actually happening
thanks dog
There are many explanations available and Samsung officially explained this a few years back.
@@dinkoist common Samsung L
@@michaels4640 lol man. I don't even use a Samsung phone. I'm just a tech enthusiast. I'm not a fan/lover of brands. Brand loyalty is a stupid thing as companies like apple etc gaining from selling overpriced things.
Except he misrepresented the reddit post and is still downplaying it. Go read the post for yourself, it's incredibly damming
I think ai integration into cameras is what will be the future selling points for smartphone cameras. It can fix overblown areas in the photo, accurately depict and light groups of people who have different skin tones. Match the image we see in the mirror with the picture we take. The possibilities are literally endless and like you said it would make us ask the question "what is a photo?"
Is it really all that much different than people who put photos into their computer and edit the crap out of them to make them look better? AI integration would basically just be AI doing all that hard work on your behalf in an instant lol
Just poetic: "Moon mode magic makes the media mad, but many more manipulated mega-pixels have their merit" - Sir MKBHD
Wow chills🥶🥶
He is hilarious!
Welcome to the A.i. Matrix
bars
It's code for something
I love that he pointed out that phones do this with everything already. If I point my camera at a dog it recognizes it as a pet and optimizes the shutter speed etc to help prevent a blurry photo. If I point at food, it over saturates the tomato and lettuce. If I point it at a person, it wants to blur the background and manipulate the skin softness. But people get mad about the moon lol
@@Aiden-ham you know iphones are doing the same thing though, right?
@@Xxhenrik96xXnot all of the same things and not by default but yeah of course
@@Xxhenrik96xX Well iPhones are not doing it with the moon, so in a sense it makes Samsung AI editing better in this scenario.
@@Aiden-ham iPhones loose every camera blind shoot out because they're colours 😂
@@stephaneduhamel7706 It is because the optical zoom is too little to make it possible. The Samsungs' starting point of the moon pic is a properly exposed shot. The iPhone lacks the tele lens to get to that point so it blows it out sadly.
No joke, I actually bought the S23 ultra today and I've been nerdly excited in anticipation taking a moon photo tonight with the 100x camera. Urgh
Just moon the moon.
Same here just got it 2 hours back and excited to check the moon out. But in my mind i kinda expected it to be fake, well marques proved it. No more fun anymore
Take a picture of a nice building at 40x, it's just as satisfying tbh
Take a photo with pro mode. The result is a slightly blurrier version of the processed moon, but it's still undeniably the moon.
You can still disable Scene Optimizer to take your moon pic, and it will still look better than iPhone. Overall every single phone brand uses AI for pictures, nothing is "real"
Marques, dude, your presentation style is remarkable. You speak so simply but eloquently, a touch more rapidly than most, but crystal clear, absolutely riveting. And you toss in just a little humor to keep it all flowing like verbal silk. Sometimes when I watch a video I silently wish it would hurry up and finish. When this video ended I wanted more. I'm definitely going to check out more of your superb work. (Also, thank you for the information 😁). You've just gained a fan.
We can actually get a real picture of the moon in pro mode, basically setting the focus to infinity, increase the shutter speed to reduce blur and also as a result, take in less light, hence reduce the brightness of the moon, and we can get a pretty serviceable and real image of the moon. S23 Ultra does all these stuff like Marques said, automatically and more like the AI stuff.
News I could use. Thank you.
Yep taking pictures at night in pro mode you can get pics to look like what you see out of your eyes almost anyways not the ai enhanced stuff that's too bright that it looks like it's day pictures
I dont even understand all this "controversy", whats really the issue here, its not adding a fake image ontop of the real thing its just enhancing a shot like scene optimisation does for every shot... landscape, potraits pretty much every shot out of every phone is enhanced and nobody complains abt that, so what's the issue with the moon being given extra detail and sharpness?
@@ridgefrost i guess the problem is the fact that it's adding extra detail, not just color correction
@@aronseptianto8142 every single 100x image has extra detail added by ai , there is an ai upscaling algorithme running for all zoom shots all the time. That's what "space zoom" actually is .
Just so we're all clear, this isn't only due to the "digital age." Fujitsu film known as Fujifilm was notorious for brighter greens. So this is been a thing since we started making photos regardless of digital or chemical alterations to the imagery. Look at Ansel Adams. His photos are modified.
I used Fuji 200 asa in my Nikon F601 and won a few competitions. The pictures were excellent. No phone camera, not even my iPhone 13 pro, will win any competitions.
It wasn't done to the extent as far as I'm aware. Also i don't think most DSLR/mirrorless would do as much editing.
some would say its from even before photography was possible.
Fujitsu and Fujifilm are 2 different companies with totally different roots. They have nothing to do with each other.
@@The8thSpirit Also Fujifilm were notorious for tweaking faces in Jpegs in the early days of digital . The photographers want stark detail in the West but their wives and girlfriends are not so enthusiastic. In the far East there is a tendency to want flattering photographs and my Casio ZR5100 which was restricted pretty much to the Japanese market is chock full of make up modes. This was the last of the 1/1.7" cameras and Casio were the closest to the phone performance with very fast electronics. With a lot of documentaries and research academics used Casio for affordable high speed photography and the multiple exposure 3 shots in the ZR5100 are near instantaneous and can capture moving objects without blur. The only thing that defeated it was a flying seagull. All gone now sadly. The cursor dial does not work any more but the lens dial does. Probably best to buy cameras with a spare rotary dial and best a dedicated rather than the tilt wheel button composite type.
I’m a bit perplexed by these arguments that Samsung’s scene optimizer is the same thing as boosting saturation on certain colors in a photo.
I have been a working professional photographer for over 18 years now. I have seen every technique in the book from film cameras to DSLRs all the way down to smartphones…
Using a 200 pixel zoomed image of the moon that is then scaled up, and AI processes to essentially “draw in the detail” of what it “thinks” you would like to see in a moon shot and still calling that a “digital photo” would be akin to you sending me a photo of a blurry moon, and letting me draw in all the detail for you realistically with a paint program and saying “yup, that’s a photograph”
It’s no longer a photograph at that point. It’s a picture sure. It’s an image sure. But it’s really not right to call it a photograph anymore…
Finally a sane person in this comment section
Disagreed, I would still consider it a photograph.
@@ugarit5 No
Ok, but how well does the phone take a photo of a person who’s far away? Imagine you’re at an event and there’s a celebrity and you use the phone to take a photo at 100x zoom, how will the photo look? How will the person look in the photo? Will the same processes that the phone does with the moon and landscapes also apply to people? I think that’s also a good topic to explore.
i took a picfture of Kenny Pickett from across a basketball court and it's quite clear
@@Tyler-lu2cj during the night? Because that's really why this is such a visible issue. When zooming, the already tiny image sensor receives even less light. during the day that's no problem, but during the night it needs this aggressive AI enhancement to not show a blurry noisy picture.
@@dykam to that point it was a pretty well lit arena
iPhone will get it right, the rest take a backseat!
@@markbrito21 By the time they "invent" it, everyone else will be on the next big thing. 🤷🏻♂️
If we think about it, an actual “photo” goes through a lot of intentional post processing. as photographers we keep playing with curves, exposure balance, color calibration, white balance, sometimes even touchups. The phone is just doing “that” for the common person’s interest.
Cameras are already applying a lot of potentially unintended (to the user) processing, particularly if you shoot jpeg
I feel it becomes disingenuous when it comes to moon shots though. Taking a photo of the moon at 100x zoom is a benchmark that most people would try out to compare cameras. With a feature like this, the phone with AI moon fakery will clearly perform better than the phone without AI moon fakery, and it has nothing to do with the camera. It's like a car that detects if you're trying to test the 0-60 time and the speedometer lies to you to get a better result.
exactly
It is different altering those parameters than literally drawing into the photo. That is what this (and any other) phone does.
@@alex15095 That would be the best for the consumer, since a software update would shorten the gap between the 2 products. Sadly, this is not the case, camera IS the determining factor since it's the base for the actual software to work with, less pixels less details, type of sensors and so on. I don't see why this is a problem though, since all mechanical cameras have bigger variation, more errors and result is very dependant on the state of the art and quality control of production. Even then, each piece will always be intentional since there is no such thing as randomly unbiased hardware.
You are describing the root of digital photography. I was a professional photographer in the film days and now in the digital days I can shoot pictures and never worry about missing the shot. With a film SLR the saying was "If you saw the shot, you missed it. We would have done the same things with our pictures if we could. But we were limited to darkroom tricks like nose grease to soften the focus, burning, dodging, and masking. There were also labs that would do slide and negative retouching. Picture enhancements are done with every digital camera no matter what mode you shoot in. It is the new normal for photography.
Nope. He’s describing computational photography. There is no computational photography happening within a canon 5d or Sony a7r5.
@@obomasinladen does that include lens corrections?
@@J4sonkempson If you shoot in RAW format then lens corrections are off by default. Then, post-process software such as Lightroom or Photoshop will try to apply it on import, but typically no. As someone who enjoys using weird lenses and chunks of glass for the effects they give, lens correction would be counterproductive for me. If you're shooting images in a compressed format such as Jpeg, then yes, lens corrections for recognized lenses are often baked into the final image.
@@J4sonkempson Most lens corrections are simply a preset either in post or in camera software, not ai. Lens correction may be “manipulation” but it’s by no means computational photography like what the video shows.
@@obomasinladen I get what you're saying, mostly, and I agree that there's *something* different about AI stepping in to create something that isn't there in the original image, but it's technically not true the way that you've worded it. Computational means a computer is stepping in to help with a process. Something like the Sony's Eye-AF falls under that umbrella, and so does mounting a flash and letting it pop off when it assumes the metering is correct. Also, if you're shooting the OG Canon 5D with settings such as jpeg, auto white balance, tint, exposure, etc all of those are pieces of computational processing.
Also, by the definition of "computational photography", any editing done to the final image, whether in camera or in post-processing software, would make the final product computational. "computational photography is a digital image capture and/or processing technique that uses digital computation instead of optical processes."
The definition of computational photography is really pretty vague, and really kind of new within the landscape of photography. As it is currently, it could even allow for something like that lens correction, or Phase detect AF systems to technically fall under the umbrella since they are not purely an optical process, or the entire process of taking a digital image altogether since the camera determines which colors each pixel are to render the subject, etc
It's why you can take a picture of a lush green leaf and get something back from the camera that's more of a sickly bluish green, or faded green, or Sony's first few mirrorless cameras having a greenish tint to the images or slightly off skin tones that didn't match what you saw in real life.
"Moon mode magic makes the media mad, but many more manipulated megapixels have their merit."
Favourite so far.
I think what makes this thing different to me is that it's editing shapes and sharpness, not just colour and lighting. It feels like the difference between a filter, and actually manipulating the objects in the photo.
It is, if you read the entirety of the Reddit post you will see the Samsung camera basically add details of the moon that is not present in the source photo, the AI recognize the darker pixels and compare to the database and add the cradle of dunes to the final photo.
So does every smartphone today on any picture, unless you turn the features off. Sharpening, denoising, edge detection, fake bokkeh in portraits... Thats just off the top of my head.
Unless you only shoot raw, the "don't process my photos"-train left many years ago.
@@SgtStinger you can still shoot raw with lightroom im fairly sure. Also, since the iphone brought that feature back, a lot of manufacturers will/have done
All phones edit shape and sharpness. In ANY shot. Color and brightness too
Well ... Huawei did it first 🤣
5:39 He really slid in an alliteration there. _Moon mode magic makes the media mad but many more manipulated megapixels have their merit_
Thank you !!!! cuz i scrolled too far down to find somebody who noticed
I've been taking photos of the moon with my s22 ultra for almost a year now and I guess I always just accepted this, like...if you go look at the photo you just took you can literally watch it turn into the final photo with all the enhancements. It sits there loading for a second and then boom, moon. Whether or not that is an issue for people is not my position to say, but it's been pretty obvious that it's the case even at an average end user level.
True, same here, and I've never really had an issue with it lol
Yep - I happen to love it!
I don't think the S22 has the AI moon feature
@@mikkliish well regardless if it does or not, it heavily edits the raw photo to make it look miles better than the actual data being captured. So however it achieves the final photo, it's still heavily altering it regardless of AI or not.
@@forthewindell Actually, I was just reading that the feature may have been introduced on the S21 Ultra... so I may be wrong
I think its good that the AI improves the photos at this extent, as everyone is not a good editor, so photos straight out of pho e which looks damn good is a good thing.
Oh. I was wondering why the pictures you shared looked better. I immediately turned scene optimization off once I got my 22U. I hate phone camera over editing, so I always turned that stuff off and have always taken pictures of the moon that looked good enough to me, and still very impressive. Never knew that setting made it look better lol
Personally I like all the post processing. Although I'm also the kinda person who doesn't give a crap about color accuracy when it comes to calibrating a new TV and I don't care in the least about a flat or balanced sound when it comes to headphones. I get all that stuff has a place, especially so in a professional setting but as a consumer I want all the vivid and vibrant presets, all the V shaped audio my headphones can put out and all the post processing my S23 can handle.
Brave comment
As a person who daily drives both iPhone and s22 ultra, I get your point. I'd still say that Samsung has the best zooming phones in the industry despite all the scene optimization. In daily use 100x is impractical but I find myself taking photos with 30x zoom very often and the photos turn out fairly good. Not to mention the portraits are really good in Samsung and the video quality is better than it has ever been.
even 50x zoom seems good sometimes, and can be usable 70x zoom if you have good conditions
I do get where the criticism comes from for this, but people always say that the camera is just as much software as they are hardware and this is just one more expression of that fact
anything is good if all you use to watch those is your tiny phone screen. I still use a S20+ and thats the shittiest camera I have ever used, and the biggest problem is how it destroys real view by overdrawing and oversharpning algorhytms. It is no longer a photo, its an image.
@@VladOnEarth why are you so pressed 💀
iphone is better😂
Nice video as always! two questions 1) what’s your t shirt? what’s the wallpaper behind? many thanks!
I took a moon shot with an S22U last October and it looks pretty much the same. It even had leaves in front of the moon. So it's nothing new. Someone on Reddit had tested it with blurred shots of Jupiters moons and they too (according to this person) became sharper but were not replaced by Earths moon.
Yeah that is the most important test imo. The same test works on many different blurry moons where it uses AI to add detail. The end result is still those moons. So while you aren't getting a 100 percent raw moon photo like you would with a dslr and telescope rig, it is still impressive tech. Albeit perhaps marketed a bit poorly.
@@nowondr Kinda fake really.
@MrMarquesBrownlee.. sure bot
@@nowondr they should have marketed as an AI enhancment. Rather than that they specifically trained a model to detect moon and marketed it as an 100x zoom feature
@@tamzidahmed9706 agreed. all I was saying was attempt to clear up what many assumed to be "overlaying images". It is still not a genuine RAW photo with AI enhancement by any means, but at the same time no smartphone moon pic ever will be simply due to the physics needed to zoom in optically that much on the moon.
the size of lens required is too big for a smartphone. so the solution here is AI. better to have the feature and not use it/turn it off than to not have it at all imo. I don't disagree that it should have been marketed more transparently, though
I wish I could post a photo here but zooming into a street light with a s22 ultra/ s23 ultra allows you to see the bulbs through the bright light and while reasonably far away. So while this may be largely AI. Whatever Samsung is doing with the camera is still very impressive/ capable (In terms of adjusting for exposure, stabilization, ect).
How is adjusting the exposure time so you can see the bulb in a shining light impressive?
@@user-jt6xh2ln9z ☝🤓
@@user-jt6xh2ln9z It's the zoom that he's talking about. 100x zoom and 200 Megapixels are both a big deal.
it doesnt have anything to do with ai. You are just able to get really close to an overexposed object, so phone decreases shutter time to compensate. Which happens with any lens any time.
which phones cannot do this?
The reddit post experiment was already done by a Korean youtuber way back when the S20 Ultra came out.
Samsung has always done this (and were pretty transparent about it) and in response to the controversy they explained that the 'fake moon' was just a byproduct of their computational photography engine since it does the same processing procedure like all the other photos.
Dope video about the topic, though.
I don't see you getting enough credit for the alliteration at the end there. Bravo!
One year and you've got two likes lol
I was confused as to why it was so controversial. I thought we knew that smartphone photos were heavily processed images due to the limitations of a tiny camera and lens.
Because it’s misleading. It was giving the impression that you can take photos at 100x with that much detail when in actual fact it will very much depend on if what they’re using recognises the image and so can overlay it with detail that is correct.
@@Drenwickification maybe I'm too deep in my tech bubble because I didn't feel misled at all that 100x zoom on a phone is blurry digital zoom + whatever the AI can make of it.
@@Drenwickification ughh. This was all exolained in samsung's webpage. Turn off scene optimizer if you don't want that. Zooming in, the phone tends to use a lot of AI to clarify things such as text and lines. That is how samsung got text from far away still readable.
@@mma0911only you knew this..us regular ppl take things for face value when they say it’s 100x zoom.
@@mma0911It’s definitely more of a problem outside the tech bubble. Compare comments on these videos to the ones on TikTok, shorts, Twitter and Instagram and you’ll often see the voices explaining the tech here drowned out in a sea of people that seem to have been completely fooled or settled into the tribalism of rooting for their preferred brand. Sadly, tech today might as well be magic to the average person.
I think this really comes down to what your definition of "fake" is, versus understanding that there's a lot of post processing going on. I wouldn't say the pictures are "fake" like many clickbait titles and articles are saying, but there's definitely A LOT of post processing and software based changes to give you the final result
You don’t need twist this dude. This Samsung AI has been training on a series of know moon photo as the moon will always look the same from almost any where. It’s literally spitting out a “moon” image when fed anything that looks like the moon. In the Reddit experiment a moon photo is blurred to look like a glowing orb and set on a computer screen. The phone enhances the ord into a moon.
@@tech4now_ Correct. It’s not about whether it’s faked or not, it’s the fact that it washes the individuality of your photo. So in essence there is no point in taking it. Fake or not, it feels gimmicky. If it were actually enhancing your photo, yes - all of the above to post processing. But it’s more like auto-correcting.
If I take a picture of a bright light and then draw details all over it and tell you "look at this cool picture! I took a picture of a bright light and all these details appeared "
🤔 sounds pretty fake to me
@@TLRB86 That's not what it's doing though. It's using software and a shit tonne of post processing to enhance the details that it already knows are there through recognition. Fake would be if you could take a picture of a literally perfectly smooth light bulb in the dark miles away and have it come out looking like the moon. What Marques showed was blurry versions of what the software was able to already recognise as the moon. I think what people are forgetting is that for a picture to even be able to be taken at 100x zoom, the amount of software involved to even make the picture steady enough that it doesn't just come out a huge blurry mess is absolutely ridiculous. If the zoom was fully "fake" though, it wouldn't work in all the other situations it's been proven to work in on completely random objects and landscapes.
Heavily, heavily edited, post processed and AI enhanced, yes. Fake? No. Otherwise with that logic, any photo that is not entirely original and has absolutely zero post processing could also be classed as fake, on any phone
@@Tom1k9 you just described the word fake😂.
I took a moon shot around 5PM with my S23 Ultra, and I noticed it turned the blue sky black. I assumed one of 2 things had happened, either the phone turned the shutter speed all the way up to expose the moon correctly, or it did what Huawei was accused of. Glad to see a proper explanation on what's going on with the processing
It does turn the exposure all the way down so that may be why.
I guess if it turned the exposure right down that would do it too depending on how much light there was in the blue sky. But 5pm sounds reasonably dark at this time of year for most places.
Lol Samsung is doing it the right way.
Use pro mode and you can actually capture a good moon shot with it.
It's just with the auto mode it's more like it is doing some processing (that literally every smartphone does even pixels and iphones...
The moon is brighter than the sky (which is why you can see it), so when you expose for the moon it virtually turns the sky black.
It turns the surroundings of the moon dark
I'm so glad somebody sponsorblocked the outro, his hand nearly made it to the camera!
Good topic to shine a light on. Especially as deepfakes become more common and it becomes harder to tell if a photo or video is real. It’s problematic when you don’t know if and how an image has been “optimized” or changed, and if it’s passed off as unaltered.
The only unaltered image would be a raw file, which is impossible to view - when you look at a photo on the back of the camera you took it on, you get a jpeg preview, when you look at the files in Explorer/Finder, you get the embedded jpeg, when you see it in Lightroom/Photoshop, before you start doing anything to it, it's been processed from a raw file to something we can see as a picture, according to some prameters.
We basically never get to see a truly unaltered image, eveytime we see a photo it's been processed according to someone's or sometihng's interpretation of the data captured by the sensor.
And every debate on the matter is just everyone's different level of tolerance to alterations. Some people will only accept the image as it's been processed by whatever raw processor gets used, others will say it's fine to adjust it in order to have it represent what they themselves were seeing when taking the photo etc.
@@houserhythm it can be done using another camera app which can utilise all the cameras but doesn't have these enhancements, because these are mostly not hardware but software depemdent
Well the point is, that Samsung is actually NOT creating more information than there was before. It simply uses AI, to set the settings to an optimal angle and boost the details already given.
Also, Max Weinbach, a co. worker of Android Police, who also is a famous Samsung whistleblower, claims, that after intense searching, he has not found any source of texture in the APK of the Samsung Camera App.
By the way, this whole Samsung-fake-moon thing started with the S21 Ultra and was later prooved to be fake. And I don't understand you either, because I can not see any more detail on MKBHD's moon picture than on the original. Especially when comparing the experiment to the reddit-users results.
I remember hearing lawyers argue back and forth about this in a case concerning the admission of a zoomed in photograph as evidence. the argument was that when you pinch and zoom a photo on a phone it isn't the same as taking a magnifying glass over the photo, the phone and software actually manipulate the photo when you pinch and zoom, trying to fill in details, enhacing blurriness, etc. so one lawyer was arguing the pinch and zoom photo should not be admissible because it manipulates the photo. but all smartphones manipulate the photo zoom or no zoom with all of these kinds of tricks, so maybe something that is just a shadow when the AI software tries to improve it it makes the shadow look more like a gun when really it's only just a shadow.
I honestly don't see that much wrong with using ai visualizations to improve picture quality. The bar for quality keeps going up, and it is impossible to get a better picture quality than a competitor without doing some form of post processing/enhancements. Either way, it is very impressive to say the least!
It does make comparing cameras a problem when one of them is using AI to add details that wasn’t actually taken by the camera itself
@@Nickie102 All smartphone camerwsa do that to some degree nowadays tho did u not watch the video?
@@Nickie102 what's wrong with that?
Don't we all want blue sky and greener grass. You are literally questioning people why people edit photos and why editors spend hours to edit photos....
The problem is there not adding quality there just putting the picture of the moon over ur white circle
@@gilbertkhoueiry1304 it's like you didn't even watch the video
Really appreciate the breakdown of what's happening with this nifty image processing and the acknowledgement of both the Reddit user who blew up earlier and your earlier short, which being a short could have just slid under most folks' radar.
Finally you brought this up which i doubted since the beginning
That's the whole reason DSLRs and mirror-less cameras will never be obsolete. No matter how good the phone cameras become. Nothing beats a larger sensor and changeable lenses which can give you the raw image. So that the photographer can interpret it according to what he thinks is right for the image. And not the computer deciding for you what's good.
Except for when the mirrorless cameras use AI too.
Plus the interpretation is from human intelligence
I think everyone's getting me wrong. My main point for my argument is that I can change lenses and at least I have control over the saturation and temperature of the image whereas phone cameras do that for me. Of course there is computer and AI stuff in the mirror less and DSLRs but I still have the control over how the end product is going to look like. I have that extra room to edit and choose. Phone cameras don't have that extra room. And the camera tech and the phone cameras tech are getting better (both) at an equal rate. Therefore, these will never be obsolete. That's what I'm trying to say. Phone cameras can never replace large sensor cameras.
Phone cameras allow to switch optimization off.
@@jagpreetsingh3221a considerable number of phones nowadays offer raw format output and manual mode though? So doesn't that mean you can also have the customizations that a DSLR gives you?
I mean, I agree that phone cameras will never replace DSLRs, but that's just because both are fundamentally intended for differing use cases.
I use 100x zoom to read far away boards when on an airport. It does sharpen the text more than they actually are. Text looks different on the 100x zoom than it does when you go closer and see for yourself.
its like the graph and the plot of the graph. many regard the plot of the graph as the graph itself.
And it's so obviously sharpen, they are not even hiding that it's done. I don't know why the sudden interest from those people to discredit Samsung.
@@humanshieldz people hate on companies for the stupidest things
@@humanshieldz Because people didnt know about it. Yes, they weren't hidding it, but they didn't publicallly call it out either. People had higher expectation when Samsung phones was able take good moon pictures with it's own hardware, well turns out it wasnt that good before post processing kicks in.
@@luaerve I think they documented it on their Korean website how it's done so while I think they didn't emphasize on it, they didn't hide it either. They put it out there for people to go see it. Every company does things like that. They probably thought it's common sense, given that it's AI. Like Apple's background blur for video, it's not real either But Apple didn't explicitly said its fake blur, it's just common sense.
Perfectly well said, even I noticed this when shooting from my S23U that Samsung uses AI to aggressively Improve details in any picture you take zoom or not.
But for sure its not faking it because i tested it out with a perfect example and it blew my mind so all S23U users can try this.
Write something with a pen on a small piece of paper and stick it on the wall, now walk far away until you cant see whats written on it, and wald farther away till your 100x zoom could barely/definitely not pick up the writing, now click the picture. Don't be Suprised to see the text clearly visible post processing of the image.
Happened with me when i was taking picture of a far away plate of the room name in a hospital, i was shocked to see hand written text next to it out of no where.
“Moon mode magic makes media mad “ 😂
Spot on!! Big fan @Marques Brownlee
You could provide us a comparison between a photograph taken with the scene optimiser option turned on and turned off
It looks smoother and less detailed, but still really impressive
I tried it with the s21 ultra
@@Fastwalker27 that means it doesn't actually turn the optimizer off
Has nothing to do with optimizer
@@alireza5218
Do you know that the moon you see on the viewfinder is what the camera actually sees ? This is still a 240mm lens , it can very much see the moon
Good to see you throw a light in this aspect of AI Photography because people forget that nowadays everything is pre edited for us which is good, but the moon being the easiest thing to edit out got a whole lot of attention for nothing, glad Samsung has it already detailed somewhere
heads up for mkbhd for playing it clean and owns his mistake... mad respect, need more content creator like this who speaks truth
No He speak wrong.
What was the mistake?
@@peterwu2844 what did he say that is wrong?
He never made a mistake
@@Gyroso 0:42
I have the Fold 4. Gave up my S22 Ultra which I loved taking pics of the moon with for the big display. I've taken a couple pics of the moon with my Z4 and I'm still impressed with the pictures I get of the moon. Now I think I know why. Thanks for the heads up.
Was waiting to see how you would react to that reddit post. Good to see you owned your mistake and made a clarification video on it. That's why you are one of the best 👊
@Don't Read My Profile Photo Ratio bot
Ahahah he only did this because $$$$ talk’s always high 😂😂😂
Only option he had if he wanted to keep his channel with same viewers
@@manhanho962 not at all, the reddit user claimed it was fake, by definition, the reddit user is incorrect. It's a lot more nuanced, which MKBHD delved into. Where is this "$$$$$" you claim?
@@zod4365 I am sorry but how is that not fake?
@@zod4365 clearly u don’t understand this business lol, but I could show u something but nah will be wasting my precious time with you , not worth it 🫣
Feels like phones are doing Lightroom/capture one editing for us. The moon might be the most extreme example, but none of it feels that different from editing that's been done since the early days of film. The act of capturing a still image in and of itself has always been unreal in a way.
"This computers interpretation of what it thinks you'd like reality to be." Nailed it. I always get a chuckle when people say- it's right from my phone- no editing. Well... there's a ton of editing- you just didn't have a say in any of it.
That's some good clarification. We all expected some software to be involved however, I think Samsung still done an amazing job with it. They did not go overboard with intense software modifications to the photos I mean this 100x stuff has been since S20 ultra and is now been found out about what the reality is. Also, them making a forum on their website to explain how it works is also nice.
Am I the only one who feels Samsung really changed their methods a lot after 2019?
Yeah well said !
@Transportion Headquarters Because they had a switch of new leadership in 2020. It ain't surprising.
It's very impressive indeed the amount of detail I can get taking photos of ground objects in my S23 Ultra is insane, I fly all the time and I just spend large amount of time just taking photos of the buildings or sceneries or islands that my iPhone 13 Pro can't even do close to that tbh
@@TRX25EX exactly! It's very annoying that people call it a gimick tbh people without this phone or a 100x feature say this. If they had that camera system of 100x zoom then they would realise it's actually really fun!
I would make the argument that these aren't photos anymore.
Photos are the result of light being captured by a photosensitive material, such as film, in case of analog, or CMOS or CCD sensors, in digital. They're basically a copy of what light *did* once you took that specific photo.
Now these started with a photo, but the modifications the AI made clearly don't exist, they're not a representation of what the camera saw at that moment, they're the computers interpretation now.
Now with that, I'd say that now they're just edited pictures, not photos, because they're no longer a copy of what reality might've looked like to the camera, but as you said, the interpretation of a computer regarding how we want reality to look like.
There is no doubt that this phone takes fantastic photos, it's one of the reasons why I bought one. I didn't test it extensively yet but I already knew something fishy was going on. I took a picture in my clear living room, where I zoomed in on my partner and cat on the other side of the room (mind, I don't live in castle so I didn't zoom in THAT much), and the pictures didn't look very clear. It made me wonder at that point why people were able to get a super clear picture of the moon. Very interesting to see this process of AI going on in my phone. Thanks for the explanation!
Ain't nothing fake going on that's why he ain't say it bluntly.... cuz its real the guy works for apple
@@cantgetright888 he uses android more often than apple u donut
@@cantgetright888 you are 100% RIGHT money speaks so does he 💸💰💰 🤑🤑🤑🤑🤑🤑🤣🤣🤣🤣😌😌
@@airongmc6810people are ignorant, just need to be ignorant of these types of comments to.
@Kim Jong-un SAMSUNG ROCKS IPHONE SUCKS !!! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Great video on this subject. I had Scene Enhancement on on my S21 Ultra for a bit but could start to subtly tell some things looked "off" to me so I disabled it. Been shooting weddings and events professionally for almost 15 years so it's pretty easy to spot manipulation in software compared to just optics. Great nuanced video on this subject as it's something we'll all be having to live more with in the future as smartphones and software continue to improve.
You figured out how to disable the "moon enhancement", why didn't you show a photo with scene optimizer disabled? Would have been nice to see as a comparison.
Because when the photo still comes out showing detail on the moon, it ruins the theory.
Take a photo with the moon in full manual, drop it into snapseed and edit contrast/boost structure, and you get extremely close to the "fake ai photo".
5:38 Moon mode magic makes iSheeps* mad
Samsung says the Galaxy Camera applies a deep learning-based AI detail enhancement engine (Detail enhancement technology) at the final stage to effectively remove noise and maximize the details of the moon to complete a bright and clear picture of the moon. I think if it's just improving the image and not replacing it with an overlay or something fake that's fine.
OP here. First of all, props for how you opened the video.
One reason why you maybe weren't to replicate my findings in your example is because:
1) The moon image you have loaded on your monitor is huge. I used the 170x170 pixel blurred image which is linked in the reddit post in it's original size, not full screened. Literally 170x170 pixels
2 ) It needs to be pitch black. I'm not sure how dark your space was, but in my own testing, I've found it reliably works when there is very little to no light, no reflections etc. Try doing it at night.
3) Zoom levels from 40-70x worked well for me, but I only used those because of my distance from the monitor and the apparent size of the image on it
4) Did you have the scene optimizer mode on?
I'm writing this only to tackle a comment I sometimes see, which is that someone wasn't able to replicate my findings, and it's usually one of those things.
Also, since then, I've done even more tests (as requested by the community), which show what's happening in more detail. For me, the main issue isn't the discussion about AI/ML, rather the lack of clarity given to consumers what their software (image processing) does. I would be completely fine with the moon mode, if it was explicitly stated that it uses a neural network to fill in the details from other moon photos where optics cannot resolve them. With a statement like that - it's completely fine. It's obfuscating that is the issue, and I find the language in their Korean article to be obfuscatory. I am very liberal in that regard and don't consider only the raw output to be "pure", as can be judged by my own work.
Let’s get this pinned.
Props to MKBHD for opening with "I was wrong. Time to own it."
I always felt like the Samsung coverage here was a bit biased, but uh... well here we are. Good on MKBHD.
This is why I'm resubscribing
Biased in what way? Because definitely not biased for samsung.
Biased for Apple? Definitely!
Lol cry in your Samsung phone 😂🤭
The photo is fake, yeah, I always knew that, does that change anything? Is the moon different from the AI ? I honestly don't care. I have a DSLR camera with a 100x optical zoom, and the end result is basically the same.
Side Note : Night photography on these flagship cameras have almost exactly the same thing of adding details that are not there, But it's very subtle and uniformly spread over the entire frame not like the moon thing that's focused on a specific object. Same thing (almost)
Good video. I’m experiencing this right now with 14 Pro. The photos I take never look the same from what I’m looking into the camera app live. Under saturate, HDR gets too heavy, it’s annoying. Specially because if you press and hold to see the live frames, it’s completely different, another photo. And if you select another frame, boom, all this post-processing bs goes always. I guess we’re in that state where it’s getting out of control and they are doing too much
I think if it's just improving the image and not replacing it with an overlay or something fake that's fine.
Grande Edu
Parabéns pelo estúdio 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽
Well, you aren't buying a telescope, you're buying a phone. I really dont see a problem with this, as long as its an actual photo and not an overlay or sth like that. Obviously the zoom works, you can try it on anything else, and it will take a decent picture of that thing, even if its very far. Eitherway, to each their own.
Just buy a camera
That's what I was going to say. Regardless, I can still 100x zoom onto a sign that I can't read with my own eyes and snap a photo, sure it might process the photo to make it sharper or whatever, but I can now read the sign lol it's not overlaying a Google image of that sign 😂
@@chrishunter293 you can buy a camera, but there have been many time living where I live, being out on a walk or sth, that I see an amazing scenery, and the cameras of the s22+ are insane. They really capture the vividy that my eyes see.
Not to mention that a decent camera can cost from 500-600€. Most people dont have that kind of money for a hobby.
@@christopherbaker6375 this is the most optimal use of the 100x zoom
@@fioreloe.9256 that 500-600 Euro camera can't keep up with the S22+. You need a 3k Euro DSLR to keep up somewhat. Ofcourse, lense advantages are always true, but on a dynamic range + fidelity standpoint, you really can't match a modern smartphone flagship with a budget camera anymore. You really need some good gear.
To me, making the moon look clearer and sharper using scene optimiser and AI is the same as taking a portrait mode photo with fake bokeh. It is there to make photos look better and please the viewer's eyes, no biggie.
Agree
Not quite the same thing though. Adding fake bokeh dones't significantly alter the subject matter. What is going on here with the moon photos is.
No it's literally a fake moon plastered over the real one in order to give a sense of a clear moon. Almost like a sticker. I have the S23U and right before you take the photo is probably the real photo of how it should look and let me tell you, it ain't pretty.
@@superiortoall22 its not a sticker,have you watched the Video?
@@craigmonty every photo from a Smartphone Alters the subject significantly tho, AI Controls mist aspects of phone cameras
I like that Sony stepped out of the game with the Xperia Pro series. It's harder to take "better" point-and-shoot pictures than on an iPhone or a Samsung smartphone, but that's what makes it usable by professional photographers/videographers. If only they were a little less expensive...
That Xperia Pro i is a damn dream phone 😅
@@RawazDraws yes it is
Can you explain what you just said in a different way, I'm having a hard time understanding, but I want to understand and learn 😅
@@tylerkirby6413 I'm paraphrasing him :
Samsung ,Google and Apple are known to use phones Computational power to enhance the image after it is taken and produce a highly modified *better looking photo.
But sony in their thousand dollar phones is outputing the real photo as seen in the frame which is more natural and sometimes not as contrasty and sharp as apple's or Google
@@harshityadav0 Thank you 😁 I understand now
brother hit us with poetry right at the end hahah
This is such a non-issue. It's not a fake moonshot (like Huawei), like the reddit user claims. This is just computational photography. It's the same thing that enables bokeh portrait shots. The camera still recognizes the moon (even if it's blurred on a screen), and the phone does its moon specific processing. Why is anyone surprised that computational photography can be tweaked for specific objects when it does the same thing for portraits?
Great video, Marques! Your analysis of Samsung's camera situation was spot on. However, I'm curious to know your thoughts on how Samsung can improve their software processing to match up with their impressive hardware. Do you think they need to invest more in AI and machine learning to achieve this? Keep up the awesome content.
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In that case, why even bother with decent camera hardware if you can just generate whatever images you want sitting on your couch.
@@4nlimited3dition_4n3d because hardware and software must work together to produce a good image. computational photography needs an actual, y'know, photo - and as data captured through image sensors gets better, so does the ability to process and therefore improve it to produce a good final photo.
Hey Marques. Enjoyed the video as always. Just a quick input: the moon wobbles on a monthly basis which basically means not every full moon looks the same (this is called libration). Sooo - an experiment that lasts a couple of months where couple of full moon shots are taken from the space zoom and compared could be a good test as well.
sponsored by samsung
The amount of _behind the scenes magic_ you guys do when making a video is just amazing. I always look forward to spot a glimpse of it when a new video comes out!
Definitely noticed this happening on my Fold4 too. At max zoom (30x digital zoom on a 3x lens) the moon looks surprisingly crispy and detailed, much more so than I would expect from a 3x optical zoom.
Same thing on my S20+... But anyway it was obvious that this required software, it's pure logic. I didn't think there would be there any need for a detailed experiment for this...
Right, the resolution of these smartphones is simply limited in diffraction no matter what crazy zoom factors manufacturers come up with. They can increase the focal length (or support digital zoom) as far as they want, it won't change much with a small lens.
well the point is, that Samsung is actually NOT creating more information than there was before. It simply uses AI, to set the settings to an optimal angle and boost the details already given.
Also, Max Weinbach, a co. worker of Android Police, who also is a famous Samsung whistleblower, claims, that after intense searching, he has not found any source of texture in the APK of the Samsung Camera App.
By the way, this whole Samsung-fake-moon thing started with the S21 Ultra and was later prooved to be fake. And I don't understand you either, because I can not see any more detail on MKBHD's moon picture than on the original. Especially when comparing the experiment to the reddit-users results.
I definitely got vibes of Michael from VSauce during your closing monologue 🤣 I got an S23 Ultra about 4 weeks ago now and I love it, I've also been interested in photography and dabbled for my own recreation. And I'm loving what I can do with the S23 Ultra, I think you do still have to have an eye for good photography, in terms of composition, the phone can't do that part for you, but I'm having great fun adding to my own portfolio... but then, is it my own portfolio? Or is it now a collab between my composition and the S23 Ultra's processing?!?!?!
The end was just so gangster, love it homi 😍
Kinda sucks that this is the way it is but it's also pretty neat on the tech side. Try zooming in on text from far away. It's interesting to see how the AI acts. Sometimes it will get it right sometimes it will give you random characters from other languages.
Nowadays A picture from phone
90% Ai
10 % reality
Exactly 💯
That's why you should use a professional camera
this comment is a verified npc banger
Just like women
@@bluesfear 😆😆🤣
I LOVE how mkbhd now ends his videos with this segment or some sort of phrase or metaphor, it's sooooo nice for some reason and well thought out,
The intro and the content is Top of the line ofc, don't get me wrong
Love ur vids!!!!
Also my favorite camera are the iPhone's, because of social media integration and better video and extremely consistent reliable detailed fast photos, LOVE IT!!
Seems like he ended it with an alliteration in this case
Some of the behind the scenes for those things is on The Studio TH-cam Channel
@@edewaal97 Yep I watch and love the vibe and aesthetic of that channel too!
@@markbennett6658 Yep, yeh definitely the word I was looking for, thanks!
@elfrjz these aren’t necessarily puns
Appreciated Video, thanks Marques and ofcource the MKBHD Team!!
Photo-graphy is the art of drawing with light, or graphically capturung photons true to what is actually there. AI enhancement can be interesting, I'm not against it, but ultimately I find it more rewarding to stay true to the original, faithfully channeling light using lens, aperture, shutter speed and exposure medium.
This is why Samsung prrivide a Pro mode for a pro user like you :)
If you want originality then simply use Samsung's expert raw mode it's as simple as that. Samsung has given every option and it's up to you which one you prefer...
Haven't we known this for years? It was obvious with my S21 Ultra... the S23 Ultra is no different.
As you can see not everyone knows this, even people that are tech minded and come to watch tech video's didn't know this.
You can read couple comments in this comment section that people bought the phone cause of that excellent PR marketing zoom.
What do you think of none tech people getting fooled by it? Yes, they have no clue and think it was really that good.
This is the issue with this.
0:09 I was dying for a vsauce music
Yes😢
"many more manipulated megapixels have their merit". great little tongue twister outro there, Marques
Good one Marques!
all brands have some AI processing happening on their pictures, and theres nothing wrong with it. It saves normal people the hassle and provides results that are ready to share. Said that I would like to see what this moon pic looks like in RAW?
What's wrong with it is taking it too far. Some color correction, sharpening and high dynamic range stuff is fine. But when a neural network creates information that wasn't there before it is no longer a photo.
@@chrisidema well the point is, that Samsung is actually NOT creating more information than there was before. It simply uses AI, to set the settings to an optimal angle and boost the details already given.
Also, Max Weinbach, a co. worker of Android Police, who also is a famous Samsung whistleblower, claims, that after intense searching, he has not found any source of texture in the APK of the Samsung Camera App.
By the way, this whole Samsung-fake-moon thing started with the S21 Ultra and was later prooved to be fake. And I don't understand you either, because I can not see any more detail on MKBHD's moon picture than on the original. Especially when comparing the experiment to the reddit-users results.
@@chrisidema Every single Zoom Camera on every Phone that is not using a 3x or 5x optical zoom is "creating" new information. If you take a 10× zoom photo with an Iphone the phone is neither capable of doing a 10× optical zoom nor can it just "zoom" into a normal picture because that would look awfull so what does it do? It enhances the photo in a way the 10× zoom looks acceptable, it creates information that it did NOT capture on the OG photo.
When huawei did it, everyone yelled and shat themselves. Now its samsung and MKBHD likes his Samsung money and people love it
@ bejenaru You work for Huawei?
Or u just jealous? Or u can't afford the S23u?
When I started seeing pictures of a super crispy moon I was really starting to believe Samsung got phone photography right, now I just realize phone photo processing has a way of showing us things we want to see, except when we open up the front facing camera…
That's true of ALL smartphone photography
hey i like what i see in my front camera
Well the point is, that Samsung is actually NOT creating more information than there was before. It simply uses AI, to set the settings to an optimal angle and boost the details already given.
Also, Max Weinbach, a co. worker of Android Police, who also is a famous Samsung whistleblower, claims, that after intense searching, he has not found any source of texture in the APK of the Samsung Camera App.
By the way, this whole Samsung-fake-moon thing started with the S21 Ultra and was later prooved to be fake. And I don't understand you either, because I can not see any more detail on MKBHD's moon picture than on the original. Especially when comparing the experiment to the reddit-users results.
Glad you made a video about this. Saw a TH-cam short about it a few days ago and didn’t really understand what he meant. Thought Samsung was just using an image of the moon and not taking a picture of it at all. Something’s take more than a minute to explain 😆
I think there's a big misconception here. Everyone seems to think Samsung's AI is adding detail that doesn't exist, when in fact, they are just using a best guess "Convolution Kernel", well, multiple passes and multiple guesses, but still. I just uploaded a video that explains the math and science behind this, with examples, explained by an engineer. You can check the video out if you want, but the bottom line is that the images are far from fake and Samsung is definitely not creating detail from nothing as most people suspect.
That said, I can see why people would assume this and it's no fault of their own.
Moon mode magic makes the media mad, but many more manipulated mega pixels have their merit 👌🏿
I knew it when I had the S21 Ultra. The moon shot was so consistent that I questioned whether it was actually a photo. The moon face never changes, just the phase and color.
I like alliteration at the end. A bit of a CGP Grey style alliteration
This is not true. I have a S21 Ultra and many moon shots that I took with it, depending on the phase the moon face is clearly different.
If you take a photo of ‘blurry paper printed moon’ and the photo is sharpened even though the actual subject is blurry it’s ‘fake’.
So I have an S22 ultra and I knew something fishy is probably up with the moon photos, so I tried clicking pictures in Pro (manual) mode and played around in lightroom. Despite my best efforts, I couldn't get the pictures to look as good, but I was still impressed with what I could get without the AI processing. Samsung could've left it that way and it would've been impressive enough, but yeah. What is a photo?
I’m very impressed with your work! And I can say that you’re improving every day 🙏🏾 I follow your job since 2015
I like how it works, to me it doesn't feel fake, but rather the camera and the software are doing exactly what they need to do. They make the moon look better like no other smartphone camera does. Because without it you get a blurry overexposed orb on any smartphone camera.
Now if this was a full DSLR or Mirrorless real serious camera doing this stuff, I'd be concerned, but for a smartphone I think it's perfectly fine!
S23 Ultra ROCKS!
Sure. Then why not just taking image from internet. It's literally similar to what Samsung did.
@@fantasytky28 because people like the experience of capturing the moon with their phones?
@@Mew-ip3iy but that's the point, you're not "capturing" what's actually there.
@@basketcase1235 That's true even of regular photos. Samsung especially, but everyone in general, try to make the picture pop, look better than what your naked eye would recognize
Also, in general, nothing is actually "there" Everything is a product of lighting, perspective etc. A picture is always in the eye of the beholder
What is capturing then, applying filters doesn't consider it 'capturing'? Is it the amount of filtering that would classify it 'capturing'? Or is it raw photos only?
Out of all of this, and the discussion about how phone cameras work, my greatest takeaway from this is "I need to invest in a separate, dedicated camera, so I can trust that my picture isn't being altered unless I actively make the choice to alter it, otherwise I can basically call every photo I take 'AI generated content' rather than a real photograph".
Whee. I love our megacorp-steered technology landscape. It's just the bestest.
I mean, it's what people wants. What I really hate about it is the fact that all companies are being dishonest about it, and that it's not intuitive to turn it the AI off, if it's even possible.
But yeah, prettier photos is not exactly what I'd call a "bad thing".
What does it do at 100x zoom on something it doesn’t recognize? Like a graffiti painting or a person where it doesn’t know what to make it look like? I think that would be a better test of the camera than taking the exact same limited photo as what the developers use to advertise with…
These tech reviewers are not doing that because they know that would go against their narrative. It has actually been shown that the AI works to enhance the detail of every object taken from far away, not just the moon photo. That shows superiority of Samsung software. But instead of pointing that out, they are all quivering making a big deal out of nothing.
@@novadon4729 Samsung isn't unique for using upscaling and optimization, nearly every single phone out there has it. Not to mention how easily available the software is to upscale or enhance in post production.
Now the real question is, how does the photo look like with scene optimizer disabled?
Clearly explained by MKBHD as always. Also, feel like the moon thing is being blown out of proportion - the phone remains solid with the superb camera, video and zoom - an AI enhanced feature is not really "fooling", but maybe could have been added as an AI feature instead.
True, this drama is unnecessary
wait til the iPhones do this, MKBHD won't make any sort of drama 🎭 🤷 but instead, praise it 😅
How not to own your mistake. “All photos are fake”.
that's an appreciation video for the real 'photographers' out there, who really sweat out, during the days & nights to capture some real pictures of the world, using Manual Mode 😉
It's amazing how you can explain these complicated subjects in just 5 minutes.
Keep watching for amazing loyalty prizes 🎉