Huawei make some of the best smartphone cameras in the world — they normally top DxOMark each time they release a new smartphone FWIW these days. You would think that a company the so obviously has a smartphone imaging game far ahead of anyone else would just let their results speak for themselves but unfortunately not.
Not for the first time mind you, they have today been called out for claiming some images taken with a $5000 Nikon D850 DSLR were taken with a P40 Pro. Huawei are/were running a contest in China to promote the imaging on the P40 Pro. Two of the images that Huawei are using as examples of those taken with a P40 Pro though were found by a Weibo user on 500px — a photography sharing platform.
As you can see the images have been taken by the same user but the details of each image show that they were taken by a Nikon D850 and not a Huawei P40 Pro. Of course after an uproar Huawei has made a statement saying that the images were “wrongly marked” due to “an oversight by the editor”.
The original video promoting the contest has now been edited and does no longer say that all photos came from Huawei smartphones. It nearly sounds plausible until you remember that Huawei have been busted doing this before — once with the Nova 3 a couple of years ago, two years before that with the P9 and last year with the P30. You would think that a company who has been caught out making this “mistake” would be more careful each time.
Unfortunately, instead of marvelling in the amazing images that can be taken with Huawei Android smartphones you are instead wondering if those images they are using to promote it were actually taken by a smartphone at all. We have the P40 Pro on our review bench at the moment and in the next couple of weeks will show you just how good the camera is — keep an eye out for that.
Huawei need everything going right for them for them to continue their surgence up the smartphone market share given the state of play with US-China relations. Their smartphone imaging should be left to speak for itself but unfortunately these “mistakes” seem to keep happening. Hopefully this is the last time they make this “mistake”.
Again? They never learn… I’d love to see some sales numbers from Huawei in Australia for devices without Google Services.
It really makes you think about how much influence the Chinese government may have over Huawei and whether we should believe the bullshit Covid-19 stats coming out of China. I have a Huawei tablet, I think I’ll offload now.
That’s a long bow … but to say there’s growing distrust of China generally in the west is an understatement.