Xiaomi 17 Ultra's 'Moon Mode' Got Fooled by a Solar Eclipse
During a recent solar eclipse, photographers tested the Xiaomi 17 Ultra's telephoto camera and noticed something odd: the phone's software applied its moon-detail-enhancement algorithm to the sun, producing an image with lunar-like texture instead of an accurate solar image.
Xiaomi, like Samsung before it, uses AI models trained to recognize the moon and overlay or enhance detail that the camera sensor alone can't capture at long zoom ranges. This works fine for actual moon shots, but the system apparently misidentified the sun during the eclipse and applied the same enhancement, revealing that the 'super zoom' moon shots many phones produce are partly AI reconstruction rather than pure optical capture.
The incident reignited debate over how transparent phone makers are about computational photography, especially marketing claims of authentic optical zoom.