Samsung Used Stock Photos as Proof of Galaxy ‘Camera Quality’

When you see a photo touting the quality of a smartphone camera, you expect that photo to have been taken with said smartphone camera..

But Samsung Brazil was recently caught using DSLR-shot images from a stock photo service in a series of tweets which flaunted the camera quality and photographic capabilities of the Samsung A8 smartphone.

The tweets were first spotted by eagle-eyed Twitter user Feliperas, who took screenshots of the images Samsung Brazil used and presented the images alongside identical pictures in the Getty Images library (via DesignTAXI).

Feliperas then tweeted this evidence at the company, saying in Portuguese: “who are you trying to fool, Samsung Brazil?”

Samsung Brazil pulled the tweet and offered the following explanation as to why it used stock images to tout the camera of the A8.

Twitter / Filiperas

“Oops, sorry, you’re right, Feliperas,” Samsung Brazil wrote. “Many of the photos we post are taken using our smartphones, but some, like this one, comes from a database of images that resonate with our target audience.”

But, as DesignTAXI points out, Samsung Brazil had actively made those images seem like they were taken with the Galaxy A8.

“A date captured in many selfies. The front camera of #GalaxyA8 has dynamic focus to highlight what matters most,” Samsung Brazil wrote in Portuguese. Another tweet suggested that the Getty stock image was an indicator of the “ready-to-post” quality of pictures taken with the Galaxy A8.

Even Android Police concluded that Samsung “intended to mislead” with the photos.

The Galaxy A8 doesn’t even have that poor of a camera, either. While the A8 series is thoroughly a mid-range flagship, it’s outfitted with a pretty standard 8-megapixel rear camera. Which begs the question of why Samsung Brazil went through the trouble of faking the camera’s quality.

It’s worth noting that Getty Images’ terms and conditions explicitly bar subscribers from falsely claiming authorship of images on its platforms.

The situation is pretty humorous, especially when you consider Samsung’s ad campaigns that frequently target Apple and its devices.

Apple, for its part, uses its #ShotOniPhone marketing campaign to show off the cameras on its own smartphones. But, of course, Apple only uses pictures actually taken with iPhones for its marketing material.