Huawei recently launched a photography contest to promote its new flagship P40 Pro, but now it's catching flak for trying to pass off photos taken with a DSLR as ones shot with one of its phones.
Earlier this month, Huawei kicked off a contest for its Next Image community, and a video on Weibo included several high-quality photos and at the end said they were "taken with Huawei smartphones." As South China Morning Post notes, though, Weibo user Jamie-hua found that some of those photos were actually taken with a $3,500 Nikon D850 DSLR camera.
The photos were found on 500px, an online photography site, and were taken by photographer Su Tie.
Huawei has since apologized and said that the photos were incorrectly marked due to "an oversight by the editor". The company has also updated its original promo video for the contest to remove the claim that the images were taken with Huawei phones.
This is a pretty serious issue on Huawei's part, but it's also worth noting that this isn't the first time that the company has been caught trying to pass off DSLR photos as being taken by its phones. It's actually happened a few times in recent years, like in 2018 when an ad appeared to show that a selfie was taken with the Huawei Nova 3, but it was actually snapped with a DSLR.
What's especially strange about these issues is that Huawei's flagship phones regularly get praise for having great camera performance. Hopefully this is the last time that Huawei is involved in a controversy about passing off DSLR photos as being taken with a smartphone.
