Huawei Caught Passing Off DSLR Pictures To Promote Smartphone Contest

Insanity is officially defined as performing the same action repeatedly and expecting a different result for each outcome. For Huawei, the company was caught red-handed again, this time for allegedly taking DSLR pictures and passing them off as photographs capture by their own smartphones.

Apparently, the Chinese brand was promoting a smartphone photography contest with a video that showed off breathtaking pictures supposedly “taken with Huawei smartphones.” To Huapend Zhao, a 2nd place winner in the iPhone Photography Awards, something about the images in the video didn’t fly.

After a bit of digging and cross-referencing, Zhao discovered that these photos “taken with Huawei smartphones” were in fact, images captured using a DSLR camera. Specifically, a Nikon D850 that costs upwards of RM10000, and that’s just for the body.

Huawei has since apologised to the masses via its official Weibo account, stating that the offending photos were “wrongly marked” due to an oversight by the editor. It’s also updated the original video, removing the line that claims the photos inside the video came were captured using Huawei phones.

If the start of this article wasn’t clear, this isn’t the first time Huawei has been caught plagiarising and passing off other people’s work as its own. Back in 2016, the smartphone tried to pass off a picture captured with a Canon EOS 5D Mark III. As one taken with the P9.

In 2018, the brand came under fire again when an Instagram post by Egyptian actress Sarah Elshamy showed that a supposedly “fun selfie” captured by the brand’s Nova 3’s front-facing camera was actually a carefully composed shot taken – you guessed it -with a DSLR.

Perhaps the most recent scandal for Huawei, however, took place last year when it tried passing off stock photos from Getty Images as images captured with the P30 smartphone camera, its flagship device at the time.