'There is no such thing as a real picture,' says Samsung exec
theverge.com
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I can’t quite put my finger on why this is so disturbing. What group of people sat around and decided that this moon trick would be a great feature to add to the phone? What was the thought process? Not bothered by the deceptive nature of this they shipped it. That’s just so far from my values - what other things will they add and only admit to when found out?
They don't, though. Oh, the awful camera in a smartphone does, because the sensor is so tiny and there's barely any lens. But classically speaking with a "real" digital camera? No, there is no further processing. The values for each pixel are a measurement of the intensity of the light falling on the sensor.
It is true that further processing might be necessary anyway. Some sensors do not correlate easily to RGB displays and their raw data may not be displayable on any device without deinterlacing, dithering, and transformations where one sensor pixel does not translate directly to one display pixel. But even doing that sort of conversion automatically is controversial, which is why most dedicated digital cameras provide access to the raw sensor data.
Lots of people assume RAW means just that, but raw usually just means pre-debayering. There may still be some amount of noise reduction applied prior to this step. This was a huge deal for Sony sensors and astrophotography for a hot minute.
That was a different issue: they were using a lossy compression algorithm for RAW photos that couldn't preserve single bright pixels.
Smartphone lenses are very sophisticated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30557578
"Phones do an enormous amount of image processing today of course, but as far as I can tell, not much of that is actual optical correction because the lens, while tiny, is already optically pretty sharp and good thanks to the highly exotic design."
It's not one guy, some aberration, or an isolated incident.
They have never hesitated to use smoke and mirrors to sell their products. If they were horse breeders, then they'd be the type to dye the horse's hair black and put a pepper up its bum to make it more "lively".
This is at the forefront of my mind because I was just over at a friend's place, trying to show him a 4K HDR video of a recent trip that I've uploaded to YouTube.
On my Sony TV, it looks spectacular, if I must say so myself. I can't take credit, really, it's the camera. It's an expensive DSLR, and it doesn't do any image fakery. I also mixed in some footage from an iPhone using ProRes mode. You can barely tell that that clip was shot with something that fits in my pocket!
On his Samsung flagship TV it looks... bad. Garish. Over-sharpened to the point that hair flickers as it moves because of the aliasing artefacts.[1] Colors are blown out to the point that they can't be distinguished, even if they were originally different. The brightness is boosted so high that normal scenes make you squint. Everything has Pop! Glare! Bang! Glitz! ... like a circus lit up at night. It's a clown show.
Other brands take pride in their televisions being calibrated to show the creative intent and the subtleties that modern visual artworks can achieve.
Samsung cranks everything to 11 so that their TV stands out amongst the competitors' models in the store.
The moon thing is the same. They know that the majority of the consumers aren't literate enough in photography to know the futility of photographing a tiny celestial object with a wide angle lens, so they fake it because it keeps phone sales high.
At the end of the day, they sell more products as a consequence of these decisions. Customers vote with their wallets, but most voters are dumb. It's as simple as that.
[1] It's a slightly older model, which I'm guessing had its sharpening tuned to 24fps movies in an era when most 4K movies were upscaled from 2K, so hair was generally blurry. Now that hobbyists are producing 4K 60fps home videos downscaled from 8K sensors, every hair is sharply defined out of the camera, so the TV overdoes things and the result is trash.
You're correct that Samsung's defaults over hype all the settings but there are alternate presets including "Natural" (less hyped) and "Filmmaker" (unhyped and targets film gamma response). There's also a Custom preset which users can adjust and save to their preferences. There's also an undocumented Service Mode where users who have appropriate calibration gear and experience can adjust a couple hundred parameters. While Samsung's defaults are particularly over-hyped, all the high-volume, consumer TV manufacturers do this to some extent and have been increasingly doing it pretty much since TVs started having digital presets.
As always, displays are imperfect approximations which involve a series of trade-offs. The key is to pick the optimal display technology and device for the context, content, user and use case. My primary viewing room is a custom-built, dedicated theater room with full light control and a 150" screen driven by a laser projector. Obviously, in that context I selected the gear very differently. For selecting TVs and monitors, the review site www.RTings.com is quite good and can be trusted to provide objective testing and analysis on displays that will get you in the ballpark since it's usually not possible to personally audition every option.
To quote my other friend (an engineer): “technically correct is the best kind of correct!”
> The lawyer argued Apple uses AI in its pinch-to-zoom feature to create "what it thinks is there, not what necessarily is there.”
https://gizmodo.com/kyle-rittenhouse-s-lawyers-claim-zooming...
https://old.reddit.com/r/Ghosts/comments/11jvwy4/after_years...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Ghosts/comments/11lvyxd/in_regards_...
People showed you can easily make it produce bad results. Presumably, we'll start to see AI hallucinations in camera photography more often if they continue down this route.
So all of his pictures are fakes ? /s