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

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.

Image credit - Su Tie, 500px
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.