All phone makers want to put their best foot forward when it comes to showing off the camera performance of their devices. A good camera is one of most high-sought after feature among the phone buyers. May it was this pressure that led Samsung’s Malaysia team to err and pass off a photo clicked with a DSLR camera as an image shot with Galaxy A8 Star.
Now, this is not the first time we have seen a company trying to convince people about the camera performance of their phone by showing them an image shot with an expensive Nikon or Canon. Huawei was caught doing so for the Nova 3 smartphone earlier this year.
Samsung has been caught using DSLR photo samples for depicting the camera quality of the Galaxy A8 Star handset on their Malaysian website. The website shows the blurring prowess of the Live Focus feature on the smartphone, demonstrating the levels of blurring and edge detection on portrait shots. The only problem? The photo is probably shot with a very expensive camera, paired with a very expensive lens that allows shooters to click photos with almost dreamy — and creamy — blurred background.
The original photographer, who shot the picture, looked at the image Samsung posted and gave a shout out with a post on DIY Photography. Dunja Djudjic found out about the usage of the photo after she traced back the sources for all the places where it was used. The photo in question was uploaded to the EyeEm community which was eventually put out for sale via its partner Getty Images.
Djudjic’s reaction to the misuse was mostly hilarious. “My first reaction was to burst out into laughter. Just look at the Photoshop job they did on my face and hair! I’ve always liked my natural hair colour (even though it’s turning black and white), but I guess the creator of this franken-image prefers reddish tones. Except in the eyes though, where they removed all of the blood vessels,” wrote Djudjic. Samsung also changed the background of the photo to clearly demonstrate the blurring capabilities of the camera since the original’s background was blurred naturally.
Since the license for the photo was purchased, Samsung hadn’t done illegal. But it may ethical what the marketing team of the company did. Djudjic felt that the person who photoshopped the image could have done a better job with the retouching. In order to confirm whether the purchase was made by Samsung, she tried to reach out to both EyeEm and Samsung but did not get any reply.
While Djudjic doesn’t have any issue with Samsung using the photo for their promotional material, she is dissatisfied with the false advertising claims made on the company’s Malaysian website. However, Samsung isn’t new to this – reports of a similar incident date back to early 2018 when Samsung was caught faking the camera samples for its Galaxy A8 smartphone.
This brings up an important point to consider if you are hunting for a camera centric smartphone in the market – one shouldn’t believe blindly on the promotional materials used by OEMs. In terms of image quality, smartphone cameras have surely gone a long way, with some of them almost pretty close to the DSLR territory in certain conditions. Smartphones such as the Pixel 3 and the Huawei Mate 20 Pro are capable of taking exceptional images with the combination of a potent hardware and intelligent software. But the physical limitations of a smartphone’s form factor will keep limiting its performance and it would be a while before we start expecting smartphone cameras to be on par with DSLR cameras.
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