Huawei recently published some image samples as part of a teaser campaign for the upcoming P30 Pro’s camera with periscope zoom lens — but it turns out they were shot on a DSLR, as spotted by GSMArena. This isn’t the first time that Huawei has faked its phone camera results — the last time it happened was in August 2018 for a Huawei Nova 3 commercial.
The P30 Pro’s camera includes purported specs that sound interesting on paper, including four cameras, a periscope lens (similar to what Oppo pulled off), and 7x zoom. However, if Huawei isn’t willing to be honest to the public in a teaser campaign about the imaging capabilities of its products, then it’ll be more likely that would-be customers will write off their potential (and future) advancements as false.
To make an embarrassing situation even worse, it turns out some of the photos uploaded to Huawei’s official Weibo account were stock photos and not their own original DSLR shots. As GadgetMatch found out by doing a reverse image search, a photograph featuring a young child that was supposedly shot on the P30 Pro is eerily similar (i.e. identical) to a photo originally from someone’s portfolio posted back in 2009. Another fake image sample that featured an erupting volcano turned out to be a stock image from Getty Images.
It’s very possible Huawei simply licensed these photos for its teaser campaign rather than outright copying them, but it’s weird to see them used to represent a smartphone. It’s a bad look.