14 DAY TRIAL // Samsung was caught with the hand in the cookie jar, again, this time for using a picture taken with a DSLR camera to showcase the capabilities of the portrait mode for their Galaxy A8 phone.
Samsung doesn’t seem to learn from its mistakes, although it’s not even fair to call them mistakes. The company goes out its way to use photos that are not made with the cameras they are promoting, which means that the images were not actually chosen by mistake.
We have to be honest and say that Samsung is not the only company that seems to be doing this. Just a couple of years back, Huawei did pretty much the same thing with Huawei P9. And these are just the ones people found out about. It’s likely that it’s a much more extensive phenomenon than we might imagine.
The epitome of laziness
A professional photographer named Dunja Djudjic posted her work on EyeEm, and a while later somebody buys the photo. Out of a whim, she does a reverse image search to see where it’s being used, and it turns out that it shows up on Samsung.com, for the portrait mode.
Not only that a DSLR was used for the picture (she doesn’t specify the model in her article), but Samsung didn’t even bother to make their own content. Someone just bought the image, used Photoshop to change the colors and make some weird adjustments (removing veins from eyeballs), and posted it as if it’s the kind of quality we should expect from the Galaxy A8.
To make matters worse, if that’s possible, the picture was taken with an f/2 setting or lens, and the Bokeh effect (the nice blur) is basically done by hardware. It doesn’t matter what kind of lens you’re using in a phone; the blur is going to be done by software. So, it’s just straight up lying to customers.
The photographer tried to contact Samsung, to no avail. The official website is still showing the modified picture, so it’s likely Samsung has yet to notice the “mistake.”
This new development comes just a day after Samsung Nigeria posted on Twitter using an iPhone, but at least they figured that one fast.
You can also check out our Samsung Galaxy A8 review and see for yourself just how good the portraits are. Here is a hint for you; they are not as good as the DSLR one.
