iPhone Rival Busted for Using DSLR Shots in Smartphone Photo Contest

Android handset maker Huawei again has been caught red-handed misrepresenting its smartphone marketing photos, reports Abacus News.

Spotted by a former Apple “Shot on iPhone” contest winner, the images used in Huawei’s latest smartphone photography contest were shot on a DSLR and not “taken with Huawei smartphones” as claimed in the advertisement.

This misrepresentation was discovered by Huapeng Zhao, who took second place in Apple’s 2018 iPhone Photography awards with Eye to Eye, an image he captured with an iPhone 6. Zhao thought he had seen Huawei’s promotional shots from somewhere else and did not believe they were taken with a smartphone.

Zhao did some sleuthing and found the images on 500Px, a popular online photography sharing platform. The photos were taken by photographer Su Tie using a professional level Nikon D850, which is worth $3,000 and far above a smartphone in its features and capabilities.

It is not known whether the company had permission from the photographer to use the images in its marketing push.

Huawei has since apologized for the error on Weibo and has changed the wording in its promotional video.

The company removed the claim that the images were taken with a Huawei smartphone, but left the line that said the photos were taken from Huawei’s Next-Image community, which they are not.

A Huawei representative told Abacus News that this wording is accurate because people “can publish photos taken with any equipment in the Next-Image community.”

This isn’t the first time Huawei has been caught stretching the truth about its smartphone cameras. In 2016, Huawei claimed its P9 phone had dual Leica cameras even though the German company only made a few components and not the lens or the camera sensor. The Chinese company also promoted the camera prowess of its P9 phone using an image shot with a Canon EOS 5D Mark III DSLR.

In the past two years, Huawei posted a selfie shot to Instagram that may have been taken with a DSLR. This image was quickly pulled as soon as these allegations appeared on Reddit and were published by CNET.

Last year, Huawei again marketed its flagship P30 phone with photos taken by a professional photographer with a DSLR. One photo was a Getty Stock image of an exploding volcano taken over a decade ago. The company told GSMArena that the images were teaser photos and meant to be “artistic renditions” of the “unique new features that will come with the HUAWEI P30 Series camera.”