This sounds like speculation based on a few viral instances. Can you provide any sources? The moon problem you're describing was attributed to a 2023 Samsung, which was using neural upscaling. Can you provide a source describing this for this specific model (Huawei Pura 80 Ultra)?

Computational photography isn't just the smoke-and-mirrors of AI upscaling faking information. You really can get around the limitations of physics on a traditional lens with non-generative computational photography techniques, incorporating real information, like the time-series data over the length of an exposure, the data from other sensors like the accelerometer or lidar, or data from an array of lenses (as others have pointed out).

Even without those tricks, the Pura 80 Ultra specifically uses a much larger camera sensor than most phones.

Is that true though? It seems like the iphones are doing some type of skin smoothing algorithm but the Huawei is the only one that actually seems to produce actual skin texture and blemishes. My initial read was that the Huawei was the least processed of the bunch.

The Huawei uses a 1 inch sensor which is vastly superior in terms of hardware wrt to Apple's one

The Huawei phone has five rear cameras.

Why are the Chinese so… crass when they could be doing actual frontier stuff.

> not the AI scaled slop most of these cameras produce nowadays

As someone who has only been an Apple user for phones (and Canon, Sony and Leica elsewhere), AI or otherwise, Apple is not immune to relatively heavy post processing in software. They're certainly not inserting moons, but even the raw sensor data has had some uplift to it.

> You can also zoom into the moon on the night sky with these cameras

iPhone, Samsung, Chinese phones, they all do fake moons now.