Huawei tries to pass DSLR photos as taken with a smartphone again, gets caught

UPDATE: Huawei has reached out to us with an official statement in English to further clarify the issue. Here is the full text: "In a recently uploaded Huawei NEXT-IMAGE promotional video, we showcased 30 pieces of work by various professional photographers to encourage users to share their own work on their social media channels. We’ve erroneously labelled one of the featured pieces as one that had been shot on a Huawei smartphone. We have since removed that image from the video. We apologise for this regrettable mistake and will improve our editorial process to prevent a similar incident from occurring in the future."

Smartphone photography is already an essential part of the marketing strategy of many big manufacturers. Companies are pushing for multi-camera systems that offer clever features like big telephoto zoom, artistic bokeh effects, bright night shots, and hundred-megapixel sensors.

Despite all that tech magic, however, smartphones still can't match a good DSLR camera, and that's completely understandable. Huawei, though, decided to bend the rules and make us think otherwise. The company tried to pass some DSLR photos as taken with Huawei smartphones in a promo video for a photo contest, South China Morning Post reports.


The mischief was uncovered by an iPhone photo contest winner, who thought some of the images in the clip looked familiar. Jamie-Hua ran a quick search and found some of the original images posted on the photo community 500px. They were taken with a $3000 DSLR camera, but Huawei included them in the video under the "taken with Huawei smartphone" label.


Huawei issued an official apology on the Chinese social network Weibo, claiming that "an oversight by the editor" was the reason behind the mislabeling. Huawei's Next-Image Awards contest debuted in 2017 to promote the camera capabilities of the company's smartphones and has been running every year since. The line that says "taken with Huawei smartphones" has been removed from the promo video, but passing DSLR photos as taken with a smartphone is becoming a sort of a habit for Huawei.

The company was caught using a DSLR photo to promote its P9 flagship in 2016. Two years later, the same strategy was used in the marketing campaign for the Huawei Nova 3 model, and the same happened with the P30 as well. No matter how good a smartphone camera system is, using DSLR photos to promote it is downright unethical.