Huawei caught passing off DSLR photos as smartphone-made, again

In a "oopsie" moment for Huawei’s PR department a photo was featured as part of a promo video for a Huawei mobile photography contest, held on Weibo. The video was meant to showcase beautiful photos taken on Huawei photos, but Weibo user Jamie-hua second-place winner at a similar 2018 iPhone contest, was paying close and actually managed to recognize and track down one of the shots in the video.

The image in question is actually available on 500px and was made by photographer Su Tie. And, as the 500px page and published EXIF clearly list, was taken using a Nikon D850 rather than a Huawei smartphone. Jamie-hua also listedd a few other suspicious shots, though wasn't able to prove where they were sourced from.

Suspicious photos

Huawei has officially apologized since, saying the photos were wrongly marked and explaining it all with an oversight by the editor. The company also edited the promotional contest video to not include the problematic shots.

We definitely understand that mistakes can happen, especially when dealing with user-submitted content, but this is not a first for Huawei. Sure, details and particulars have always been slightly different, but the Chinese giant does have a habit of passing-off, accidentally or not, DSLR shots as ones taken from their phones. There was a similar case all the way back while the Huawei P9 was being promoted. More recently, the Huawei nova 3 was involved in an eerily similar DSLR-related promotional mix-up. And, of course, there is the now infamous P30 zoom fiasco. Granted in those previous cases it wasn't explicitly stated that any of the shots was produced by the phone itself, but the implication was quite clear.

Suspicious photos

Seeing how this has happened time and time again in the past, one would think that some extra internal company caution and procedures would be in order. And if we consider the theory of ulterior motives, we can’t really say we are any less confused, since Huawei phones typically have excellent photography skills they can already stand on.

Source 1 (in Chinese) | Source 2 (in Chinese) | Via