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.
Wednesday October 15, 2025 6:07 am PDT by Joe Rossignol
Apple today updated the 14-inch MacBook Pro base model with its new M5 chip, which is also available in updated iPad Pro and Vision Pro models.
In addition, the base 14-inch MacBook Pro can now be configured with up to 4TB of storage on Apple's online store, whereas the previous model maxed out at 2TB. However, the maximum amount of unified RAM available for this model remains 32GB.
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Apple today announced the next-generation iPad Pro, featuring the custom-designed M5, C1X, and N1 chips.
The M5 chip has up to a 10-core CPU, with four performance cores and six efficiency cores. It features a next-generation GPU with Neural Accelerator in each core, allowing the new iPad Pro to deliver up to 3.5x the AI performance than the previous model, and a third-generation ray-tracing ...
Sunday October 12, 2025 7:05 am PDT by Joe Rossignol
Apple plans to announce new products "this week," according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.
Apple's "Mac Your Calendars" teaser last October
In his Power On newsletter today, Gurman said the products set to be updated this week include the iPad Pro, Vision Pro, and "likely" the base 14-inch MacBook Pro, with all three likely to receive a spec bump with Apple's next-generation M5 chip.
Gurman...
Wednesday October 15, 2025 3:54 pm PDT by Juli Clover
We didn't get a second fall event this year, but Apple did unveil updated products with a series of press releases that went out today. The M5 chip made an appearance in new MacBook Pro, Vision Pro, and iPad Pro models.
Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more videos.
We've rounded up our coverage and highlighted the main feature changes for each device below.
MacBook Pro
M5...
Tuesday October 14, 2025 11:59 am PDT by Juli Clover
Apple marketing chief Greg Joswiak today teased the launch of an upcoming product, saying "something powerful is coming" on social media.
Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more videos.
A short animation accompanying Joswiak's teaser reveals a brief glimpse of a MacBook Pro along with the words "coming soon." The shape of the MacBook Pro is a V, which is the Roman numeral...
Apple's AirPods Max have now been available for almost five years, so what do we know about the second-generation version?
According to Apple supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, the new AirPods Max will be lighter than the current ones, but exactly how much is as yet known. The current AirPods Max weigh 0.85 pounds (386.2 grams), excluding the charging case, making it one of the heavier...
Thursday October 16, 2025 9:13 am PDT by Joe Rossignol
Apple on Wednesday updated the 14-inch MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and Vision Pro with its next-generation M5 chip, but previous rumors have indicated that the company still plans to announce at least a few additional products before the end of the year.
The following Apple products have at one point been rumored to be updated in 2025, although it is unclear if the timeframe for any of them has...
Wednesday October 15, 2025 6:14 am PDT by Joe Rossignol
Apple today updated the Vision Pro headset with its next-generation M5 chip for faster performance, and a more comfortable Dual Knit Band.
The M5 chip has a 10-core CPU, a 10-core GPU with Neural Accelerators, and a 16-core Neural Engine, and we have confirmed the Vision Pro still has 16GB of RAM.
With the M5 chip, the Vision Pro offers faster performance and longer battery life compared...
Tuesday October 14, 2025 4:35 pm PDT by Juli Clover
Apple is going to launch a new version of the MacBook Pro as soon as tomorrow, so we thought we'd go over what to expect from Apple's upcoming Mac.
M5 Chip
The MacBook Pro will be one of the first new devices to use the next-generation M5 chip, which will replace the M4 chip.
The M5 is built on TSMC's more advanced 3-nanometer process, and it will bring speed and efficiency improvements. ...
Wednesday October 15, 2025 6:59 am PDT by Joe Rossignol
The new 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M5 chip does not include a charger in the box in European countries, including the U.K., Ireland, Germany, Italy, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Norway, and others, according to Apple's online store.
In the U.S. and all other countries outside of Europe, the new MacBook Pro comes with Apple's 70W USB-C Power Adapter, but European customers miss out....
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.
