Huawei gets caught faking DSLR shots as smartphone pictures in a commercial

Smartphone cameras are better than ever, but sometimes there’s just no substitute for a full-sized DSLR. Unfortunately, it seems that Huawei thinks so, too. A shot in the company’s latest commercial for its new Nova 3 smartphone has been revealed by a behind-the-scenes photo to be a DSLR, not the smartphone as the ad alleges (spotted by Reddit user AbdullahSab3, via AndroidPolice).

As you can see about halfway through the ad, a bickering couple takes a selfie together apparently to show off how Huawei’s AI and camera tech make it so that the woman doesn’t need to put on makeup. But a since-deleted Instagram picture posted by Sarah Elshamy (the actress in the scene) reveals that instead of a fun selfie from the Nova 3, the shot in question came from a DSLR, shot by a professional photographer. In fact, the Nova 3 doesn’t seem in be in the frame at all.

Image: u/AbdullahSab3 (Reddit)

In Huawei’s defense, the ad never outright claims that the picture was shot on a Nova 3 (although one could argue that it was heavily implied). And, as Android Police points out, this isn’t exactly Huawei’s first marketing mishap: the company was caught Photoshopping away bezels on renderings for the P8, and it was found to have posted a shot that appeared to be from a P9 on its Google+ page that EXIF data revealed to have been shot on a Canon EOS 5D Mark III.

Still, it’d be nice if Huawei would stick to advertising its phone based on the strength of what it can actually do — which is probably impressive enough, even without fakery — instead of hiding its capabilities behind marketing smoke and mirrors.