360Photography

You would think Huawei would’ve learned its lesson by now, but apparently not. Yet again, the Chinese smartphone manufacturer has been caught suggesting DSLR photos were images taken with its upcoming P30 and P30 Pro smartphones in an advertisement.

In both 2016 and 2018, Huawei was caught trying to do the same thing by passing off a DSLR photos as images captured with its P9 and Nova 3 smartphones, respectively.

$ (document).ready(function() { SampleGalleryV2({“containerId”:”embeddedSampleGallery_6581560962″,”galleryId”:”6581560962″,”isEmbeddedWidget”:true,”selectedImageIndex”:0,”isMobile”:false}) });

This time, Hauwei shared a collection of advertisements, seen above, on its Weibo social media account to promote the launch of its upcoming P30 Pro smartphone on March 26th with a visual design that suggested the images were captured with the much-anticipated periscope camera system inside the devices.

In a result that’s surprising no one, it turns out the images weren’t actually captured with the smartphone. While it doesn’t take much of a pixel-peeper to tell the images weren’t actually captured with a smartphone, GadgetMatch took a closer look and confirmed the images weren’t just DSLR images, but stock photos that can easily be licensed by anyone.

Using reverse image search, GadgetMatch discovered the volcano image was first shared on Flickr back in 2009 by photographer Tom Pfeiffer and also available for use on Getty Images. Similarly, the duck image was captured on a DSLR by photographer Jake Olson from a photo shoot some years ago.

Not long after it had been called out, Huawei updated the advertisements with a disclaimer saying the ads were meant only as an example, not photos actually captured by the P30 or P30 Pro. Huawei also made the following statement to GSMArena regarding the ‘misunderstanding’ in the P30 Pro preview ads:

‘We’ve been made aware that there might have been some misunderstanding regarding our recent HUAWEI P30 Series teaser posters. We would like to reiterate that those are, in fact, only teaser posters, and are only intended to hint at the unique new features that will come with the HUAWEI P30 Series. Huawei has acquired the licenses to the original images and the posters are artistic renditions of said features only. We’d like to take this opportunity to thank the media for their interest in our posters. We have much to announce in the coming weeks. Please stay tuned!‘

Fool us once, shame on you. Fool us three times…we can’t get fooled again. Let’s see how long it’ll take until we’re inevitably running the fourth edition of this article.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)