This is embarrassing: On its Malaysian website, the electronics giant Samsung advertises for the camera of the Galaxy A8 smartphone. One of the pictures shown is intended to illustrate how well one can shoot portraits with the mobile phone, where the face is sharp, but the background is blurred. A typical effect that works well with SLR cameras. Now comes out: The recording was actually made with such a camera.
The faux pas was noted by the Serbian photographer Dunja Djudjic. She had looked for an alternative for the online photo service Flickr and thereby discovered the portal EyEm, writes Djudjic on the photographer's website "DIY Photography". EyEm in turn collaborates with the photography provider Getty Images, who included some of Djudjic's images in his program. One of them, a portrait of herself, then found a buyer, and the photographer was informed of this sale by e-mail.
However, who the customer was was not told, so the Serbian tried to figure it out with a reverse image search on Google itself. And indeed, she found the photo in question - just on that website from Samsung in Malaysia. "Just look at what they did with my face and hair," complains the photographer, assuming that someone has massively edited her photo in Photoshop. The background of the picture was changed as well.
Not an isolated case
With such manipulations, Samsung is not alone: Already in 2016 Huawei had been caught doing the camera of the smartphone P9 advertised with a picture that had been made with a professional camera. In August 2018, the group once again attracted attention with a SLR photo for a smartphone camera.
In the same month, Samsung in Brazil stumbled upon a so-called stock photo from the catalog of a professional supplier, which was shown on the Brazilian Samsung website as an example of the photographic qualities of a Samsung mobile phone. A piquant detail: As in the current case, the Galaxy A8 should be advertised with the picture.
One should be fair in the matter, however, warns the tech magazine "TechCrunch". Because scrolling down the Galaxy Samsung A8 on Samsung's Samsung website, past the technical details, the promotion of other Samsung products and a product comparison, you come to the fine print. And there again in line 10 is: "All images were simulated for illustrative purposes." In other words, none of the photos shown must really come from a Galaxy A8.