Huawei Keeps Implying That DSLR-Created Photos Were Shot on Its Phones ⇥ birchtree.me
Ben Schoon, 9to5Google:
Huawei is currently running a contest for its fans in China to promote the Huawei P40 Pro. On Weibo, a video was shared that included a bunch of stellar photos that Huawei claimed had been shot on its smartphones. One Weibo user, though, noticed that one of the images looked pretty familiar. After doing some digging, he found the exact photo on 500px — a photography-sharing platform — complete with data on what actually took the shot.
Long story short, this stunning photo wasn’t shot on a Huawei P40 Pro. Instead, it was shot on a Nikon D850 DLSR camera which costs over $3,000 on its own.
Schoon points to a South China Morning Post story illustrating two examples in the same video of implying DSLR images were shot on a Huawei smartphone, and Jamie-hua, the Weibo user, actually pointed to at least three additional examples of misrepresentation.
Look, Huawai has responded every time saying that they technically never said that the photos were taken on their phones, but the context these photos were displayed heavily implied that was the case. Huawai phones can take some great photos, so I really can’t fathom why the company’s marketing does this year after year after year.
This is par for the course for Huawei. But it is particularly embarrassing for Leica, which has offered its storied name to the cameras on Huawei’s smartphones and which Huawei credits in its marketing materials as “co-engineering” the cameras in its phones. It must be awkward to see those phones and, by extension, their Leica-branded cameras promoted in a photography context with images from more capable, more expensive, non-Leica-branded DSLRs.