Samsung's "Space Zoom" feature has come under fire amid complaints that images of the moon are being artificially enhanced to an extreme extent.
Samsung introduced a 100x zoom feature with the Galaxy S20 Ultra in 2020, becoming a mainstay on recent flagship handsets from the company. Since its debut, Samsung has touted its devices' ability to take impressive pictures of the moon. Unlike brands such as Huawei, which simply overlay a PNG of the moon on such images, Samsung says that no overlays or texture effects are applied.
Yet on Friday, a Samsung user on the subreddit r/Android shared a detailed post purporting to "prove" that Samsung's moon shots are "fake." Their methodology involved downloading a high-resolution image of the moon, downsizing it to just 170 by 170 pixels, clipping the highlights, and applying a gaussian blur to heavily obscure the moon's surface details. This low-resolution image was then displayed on a monitor and captured at a distance from a Samsung Galaxy device. The resulting image has considerably more detail than its source.
Samsung devices seemingly achieve this effect by applying machine learning trained on a large number of moon images, making the photography effect purely computational. This has led to accusations that a texture is functionally still being applied to images of the moon and that the feature is a disingenuous representation of the camera hardware's actual capabilities, triggering heated debate online, even bringing into question the iPhone's reliance on computational photography.
Saturday April 11, 2026 9:14 am PDT by Joe Rossignol
Last year, Apple launched CarPlay Ultra, the long-awaited next-generation version of its CarPlay software system for vehicles. Nearly a year later, CarPlay Ultra is still limited to Aston Martin's latest luxury vehicles, but that should change fairly soon.
In May 2025, Apple said many other vehicle brands planned to offer CarPlay Ultra, including Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis.
CarPlay Ultra...
As we wait for WWDC to kick off next Monday, Apple today announced the winners of its annual Apple Design Awards, recognizing apps and games for their innovation, ingenuity, and technical achievement.
The 2025 Apple Design Award winners are listed below, with one app and one game selected per category:
Delight and Fun - CapWords (App) and Balatro (Game)
Innovation - Play (App) and PBJ -...
Saturday April 11, 2026 9:07 am PDT by Joe Rossignol
While the AirPods Max 2 received more attention, Apple also released a second pair of headphones last month: Nike Powerbeats Pro 2.
Nike Powerbeats Pro 2 are the same as the regular Powerbeats Pro 2, except they have a two-tone design consisting of black and Nike's signature Volt neon green-yellow color. The headphones were released on March 20 in the U.S., Canada, Australia, the U.K., and a ...
Samsung is set to discontinue the Galaxy Z TriFold globally after just three months on sale (via Bloomberg).
The company will start by ceasing sales of the device in Korea, where it has been on sale since December. Samsung plans to discontinue the device in the United States once it clears its inventory.
Samsung's website already lists the TriFold as "sold out," but customers are still...
AirDrop support is coming to Samsung's Quick Share feature on Galaxy S26 devices this week, allowing owners to directly share files and media with iPhones and Macs.
In a Sunday newsroom announcement, Samsung said the rollout is starting today in Korea, with devices in the U.S. to follow later this week. The feature will expand to more regions and on more Galaxy devices at a later date,...
Apple is moving more decisively to reduce its reliance on Chinese manufacturers ahead of the launch of a wave of new products with OLED panels, DigiTimes reports.
Apple has apparently accelerated efforts to diversify its OLED sourcing away from Chinese suppliers such as BOE, which have historically played an important role in the company's display supply chain. The impact on BOE has already...
Oh, that explains it. I was having surf and turf at a restaurant and took a photo of my food on this Samsung phone, but when I looked at the photo it turned into a picture of a cow, a potato, a cod, and a bag of panko.
One of the things Samsung claimed about their moon shot feature is that it's using multiple frames to create the final image, but since this experiment used a permanently blurred image it's impossible for the phone to be using multiple frames to reconstruct a sharper image. I'd be interested to hear how Samsung explain that discrepancy.
I think we can expect more and more of computational / AI-enhanced photography.
I just wish we get more control over whether all these features are enabled, or to which extent.
As a photographer, I already find the images from the iPhone quite unnatural looking / HDR-ry. You can mitigate some of that by playing with Photographic Styles, or using a third party app, but I'd prefer something more straightforward.
