This week’s photo voltaic eclipse thrilled hundreds of thousands of individuals in components of Northern Europe. It additionally offered a chance for a brand new battle of one of the best digital camera telephones that is revived the controversy about the place line lies between AI-powered smartphone pictures and full fiction.
Users of 1 specific top-of-the-range telephone had been upset that their snaps of the photo voltaic eclipse got here out trying like images of a supermoon being eclipsed by one other moon. The telephone’s AI interpreted the solar because the moon and pasted a faux lunar floor texture over it.
The AI fail is obvious in a video by a French tech web site under, the place the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra, Oppo Find X9 Ultra, Xiaomi 17 Ultra, Google Pixel 10 Pro XL are put head to head using the same solar filter and identical testing protocol. One came up sorely lacking (this is another reason why people might want to learn how to make a pinhole camera to view the solar eclipse).
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Warning: never look directly at a solar eclipse and never try to photography one without using dedicated solar filters and solar viewers.
There was a well-known controversy over Samsung’s AI-enhanced moon images previously. The firm claims that what it is tech does has been misunderstood and insists that it solely sharpens actual element moderately than producing totally new imagery.
In Frandroid’s comparability video above, Samsung’s Galaxy S26 Ultra is definitely one of many higher performers. Bottom of the category is the Xiaomi 17 Ultra – Ultra in title, however mendacious in nature. Its Leica optical lens designs and color science went out the window when its ‘Supermoon Mode’ mechanically triggered and pasted a lunar texture over the solar’s floor because the moon started to obscure it. All that was lacking was Mario twerking.
Others customers say that they had an analogous expertise whereas utilizing the telephone in the course of the photo voltaic eclipse on Wednesday, with many expressing disappointment by the AI overlay.
“The moon was the other one. It detected a bright sphere in the sky, went into ‘supermoon’ mode, and straight up invented the entire surface,” one individual writes.
Xiaomi 17 pro – Fake moon superimposed onto the sun
from r/Xiaomi
It is feasible to disable Xiaomi’s Supermoon mode for those who go into the settings, however the comical AI blunder raises the query, what is the level of taking a photograph of the moon, or of any topic for those who’re not really capturing what you are seeing? There are loads of inventory images of supermoons on the market, or you would go straight to an AI picture generator.
For comparability, here is what the telephones examined value the place you might be.