Huawei Busted For Using Canon DSLR Photo To Promote P9 Smartphone’s Dual-Lens Camera

Truth in advertising. You never know what to expect when it comes to the depths that manufacturers will go to make their products look better than they actually are. From photoshopped images of products to retouched photos captured from smartphone cameras, you have to be careful that you aren’t duped by marketing geniuses.

For the folks over at Chinese devices-OEM Huawei, it appears that the company got caught red handed trying to pass off a rather exquisite photo of a woman with her hair catching a few rays of sunlight. The caption for the photo (the Google+ posting has since been removed) read:

We managed to catch a beautiful sunrise with Deliciously Ella. The #HuaweiP9’s dual Leica cameras makes taking photos in low light conditions like this a pleasure. Reinvent smartphone photography and share your sunrise pictures with us.

There’s just one problem though with the picture: it wasn’t taken using Huawei’s P9 dual-lens camera. It was instead taken with a $2,600 Canon 5D Mk. III camera backed with Canon’s highly capable EF 70-200 f/2.8L IS II USM lens (that’ll run you another $2,000). That would explain the detail in the hair and the overall magnificent quality of the image. And how do we know this? Well, Google+ preserves the EXIF data of uploaded images, which left all of those details out on the open for anyone to see.  

While Huawei never came out and overtly said that the picture was captured with the P9’s camera, the inference was clearly there. After the photo gained widespread attention, and the company was forced to take the photo down out of embarrassment, Huawei issued the following statement:

It has recently been highlighted that an image posted to our social channels was not shot on the Huawei P9. The photo, which was professionally taken while filming a Huawei P9 advert, was shared to inspire our community. We recognize though that we should have been clearer with the captions for this image. It was never our intention to mislead. We apologize for this and we have removed the image.

In other words, “No harm, no foul” and it we didn’t mean to pull a fast one on potential customers.