We’re not totally surprised this happened because it has been done before but we think highly of Huawei that we couldn’t believe it has used a DSLR photo to promote a photography contest. If you may remember, Samsung was found to be faking Portrait Mode for promotion. That was in December 2018. You think these big OEMs have learned from Samsung but apparently, the Chinese mobile OEM hasn’t. That or it simply went on with using images taken by a DSLR.
Huawei is already considered a big name in the camera phone industry. In fact, it comes up with the best ones, getting positive reviews and even taking the top ranks on DxOMark. Just recently, Huawei has been discovered to be faking for a promo. Apparently, the company used an image taken by a DSLR and not a Huawei phone.
Using a photo taken by professionals for marketing is not illegal but the thing is, Huawei is promoting a photography contest. It’s not a DSLR photography contest but one that requires photos to be captured using a Huawei phone.
The contest was teased by a video featuring impressive photos. Some images were taken using Huawei photos but some were not. Weibo user Jamie-hua saw the promo and thought some images were familiar. Being a photography enthusiast himself, he checked out the photos and discovered they were taken using a Nikon D850. The camera alone costs about $3,000 so you know it’s by a real professional. The images Jamie-hua discovered were taken by photographer Su Tie.
Huawei did post an apology on Weibo. The company explained that the images were “wrongly marked” because of an “an oversight by the editor”. Huawei already updated the video. It also reached out to our team with this statement to explain the oversight. Read below:
In a recently uploaded Huawei NEXT-IMAGE promotional video, we showcased 30 pieces of work by various professional photographers to encourage users to share their own work on their social media channels. We’ve erroneously labelled one of the featured pieces as one that had been shot on a Huawei smartphone. We have since removed that image from the video. We apologise for this regrettable mistake and will improve our editorial process to prevent a similar incident from occurring in the future.
