It is now turning into a yearly ritual that Huawei would be busted each year trying to promote its smartphone’s camera prowess with images shot on DSLR cameras. The Chinese tech giant recently promoted a photography contest with a video featuring impressive pictures that Huawei claimed were “taken with Huawei smartphones.” However, some of the pictures weren’t actually captured by a Huawei phone camera but were shot on a DSLR camera.
The controversial images were among image featured in a promotional video for Huawei’s photography contest in China. However, Weibo user Jamie-hua, aka Huapeng Zhao who won second place in the 2018 iPhone Photography Awards with a photo taken with an iPhone 6 thought some of the photos looked like what he had seen before and decided to fact check. He then discovered that two of the photos were shot by a Nikon D850 DSLR camera valued at $3,000.
Credit for the two contentious photos was given to photographer Su Tie. The photographer has worked in partnership with Huawei in the past. We recall a similar controversy in January 2019 when the company released some samples shot in the artic by Su Tie that was purportedly from the Mate 20X’s shutter. Some of the pictures were later discovered to have been shot by a Nikon DSLR camera.
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Huawei has since apologized on Weibo, saying that the photos were “wrongly marked” due to “an oversight by the editor.” It said the images were intended to encourage people to share their works on Huawei’s online gallery. The company has now updated the original video to remove the line that says the photos came from Huawei phones. It still says they were drawn from Huawei’s Next-Image community, though. When asked, a Huawei representative referred us to the contest rules in Chinese, which state that “you can publish photos taken with any equipment in the Next-Image community.
However, this incident brings to memory, Huawei’s infamous DSLR deceitful camera sample used in promoting the Huawei P9. Sometime around July 2016 when Huawei was promoting its P9 flagship, the company shared a photo on its Google+ page which was purportedly captured by the P9’s dual rear shutters. The photo was indeed stunning just like these ones, with crisp clear details downright impressive for a smartphone camera. Unfortunately, it turned out the shot wasn’t taken by a smartphone camera but was actually from a $4,500 Canon EOS 5D Mark III shutter. Huawei may not have any phone camera on the same level with a DSLR camera, but the company is edging closer to that standard employing an innovative camera and AI technology. The company’s new P40 Pro flagship ranks as the best phone in terms of camera, according to DXOMark.
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