Huawei Posts Implied P9 Camera Sample… EXIF Data Shows it Was Taken with Canon 5D Mark III

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Marketing is a double-edged sword, and many companies has been on the receiving end of it. Don’t believe us? Ask OnePlus Huawei about it!

The latest gaffe that the Android world is seeing comes to us courtesy of Huawei and one of their particular image posts on Google+ that was made to market and advertise the Huawei P9 and its camera prowess. Here’s a screenshot of the post, just in case:

What viewers are treated with is an image that has a great deal going for it in the photography department. The photo has a nice bokeh effect going on, along with the lens flare effect and some good detail on its subject. While I do not personally know a great deal about photography, the image is certainly impressive by my standards, which are at par and would be agreeable by other casual observers.

Huawei’s accompanying caption reads as:

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. #OO

If you continue on with the yardstick of a casual observer, the caption mentions the Huawei P9 and its dual Leica camera, and states how the phone makes taking photos like these a pleasure. Wow, that camera must be something, right?

Right. That camera is pretty good, but the catch here is that the camera used to take the photo is different from the Huawei P9. As Huawei may not have recalled, Google+ does retain the original EXIF data from the image. The metadata reveals (as you can see in the screenshot above as well) that the image was taken with a Canon EOS 5D Mark III with the EF70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM lens. Combined, the set up will burn a hole in your pocket to the tune of a few thousand dollars. To top it off, the image was put through Adobe Photoshop CC on a Mac by a certain Bryan Sheffield. No wonder that the image looked good, because it sure did cost a lot of money and effort.

In Huawei’s defence, the Google+ post does not explicitly mention that the particular image was taken with the Huawei P9. It just about tells you that it is easier to take such images with the Huawei P9, not that you will necessarily get all of the effects and quality in your images. And another fair point to make is that EXIF data is not at all difficult to manipulate. But if you are boasting about the image and the Huawei P9 in the same breath, you may as well go the extra mile — that is, if it’s easy to take such images with the P9, you might as well just do that! After all, it wouldn’t be the first time companies have manipulated results in their products favor.

Using Photoshop and other tools and tricks on products like smartphones is extremely common practice. The job of marketing and advertising is to sell the product, and they employ all means that they may need to. One of the most commonly noticeable “touch up jobs” for smartphones is how marketing material for smartphones “expand” the screen right up till the edge, when the actual product itself has a black border around the screen to give the effect of excellent screen-to-body ratio when the screen is off. Marketing materials explicitly show the screen on and the screen stretched till the side edges of the body, whereas in reality, bezels are functionally important to a smartphone and need to exist. That is a clear case of consciously misleading marketing, but what about this one?

Do you believe Huawei meant to mislead consumers through this advertisement? Let us know in the comments!