That’s it! This confirms my suspicion I have had all these while. I am talking how photos supposedly taken by smartphones used to promote the handsets are sometimes too high-quality to be true. Or at least, my suspicion is confirmed if this current viral news on how Huawei was caught faking smartphone photo by shooting with a DSLR as opposed to the actual phone that it is trying to sell and in this case, it was the new Huawei Nova 3/Nova 3i.
The latest slip up was all thanks to Egyptian actress and model, Sarah Elshamy. This what-could-be-the-ultimate fraud was related to a scene in product video of a man taking selfie with Elshamy. This particular scene was supposed to reinforce the idea of how the device’s beauty AI can beautify the subject(s) even if he/she/they don’t have make up on. Everything seems nothing out of the ordinary, until behind-the-scene photos surfaced on the actress’ Instagram page.
Posting behind-the-scene photos and footage seem fairly harmless, except for one particular photo. This photo shows what we consumers don’t see: a man holding a phone in front. Wait a minute… what was he holding again? Nothing. There he was, holding nothing and even more hilariously, a photographer was pictured making the shoot…. with a DSLR on a tripod.
We wanted to give the China handset maker a benefit of the doubt, but the fact that the man isn’t holding a phone was hard case to justify on the get go. Lets just say that, for some reasons, they don’t have the actual phone at all for the shoot and the handset will be added during post-production, but still depicting a scene of selfie and eventually showing the ‘end result’ that was not taken by the device is no less misleading.
Though, I won’t be too quick to come to a conclusion or even say that this might be the ultimate smartphone fraud of 2018 because, after all, Huawei and several other makers’ newer devices did prove themselves to be capable of taking awesome photos that are seemingly indistinguishable from DSLR to untrained eyes. And that pretty much made this viral news rather inconsequential.
Here’s the video of the final ad for Huawei Nova 3/3i:
Images and source: PetaPixel.
