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Samsung used my DSLR photo to fake their phone’s “portrait mode”

669 points by minikites 8y ago

amatecha 8y ago
Ah man, I immediately thought of another recent case of a smartphone manufacturer faking their phone's camera shots[0] (turns out TFA links to it as well). Just a single instance of this kind of fraud is enough for me to write off a brand forever, frankly. If you're lying to my face before I even bought your product, who knows how much else you're lying about. Zero trust for companies like this. [0] https://www.diyphotography.net/huawei-passes-off-dslr-photos-as-smartphone-camera-photos-again/ https://www.diyphotography.net/huawei-passes-off-dslr-photos...
- bryanlarsen 8y ago
  You'd write off an entire massive company for the mistakes of Hauwei Egypt or Samsung Malaysia? It's not like this is central company policy, it's the people localizing the marketing.
  - ancorevard 8y ago
    They reflect company values and culture. If this was the first incident, then I would tend to agree with you. But this is just one of a long string of similar incidents that together form a pattern that reflect on the company values.
    - sandworm101 8y ago
      >> They reflect company values and culture. If it was from Samsung. This could have come down to a single decision by a very low-level person, or likely a contractor. Samsung's marketing execs dropped the ball in not supervising the campaign properly, but I'm not ready to fault Samsung generally because of a dozen poorly-managed publicity shots. Instead, I judge them by how they react to this mistake. Do they pull the photos or not?
      - wpietri 8y ago
        This sort of thinking on brands is always a puzzle to me. Samsung certainly takes credit for every good thing done by their employees and contractors. Why does a radically different standard apply when they do something bad? Even if it made sense in some light, it's still a bad approach, because it means people with power and money are never held accountable for things that happen on their watch.
        sandworm101 8y ago
        We hold them to account by not purchasing their products. But we call out the mistake for what it is: underhanded marketing. It isn't like they installed spyware or were handing personal data to foreign governments.
        TeMPOraL 8y ago
        > But we call out the mistake for what it is: underhanded marketing. Let's call it for what it really is, then: lying in your face, at scale. > We hold them to account by not purchasing their products. Totally agreed. That's one of few ways to send them feedback directly. Other ways would include lawsuits or voting for regulation change. Given that signal here is roughly proportional to amount of lost market share, complaints in this thread are a fully legit, if indirect way, of getting more people to maybe buy less of their products.
        2muchcoffeeman 8y ago
        I’ve read the same kind of ‘logic’ applies to lots of situations. People will judge a company or restaurant or whatever more favourably if they correct a mistake to their satisfaction, rather than not making mistakes at all. It’s makes me wonder how many companies are hacking this. Don’t worry about quality past a certain point. Say everything works 95% of the time. After that, just offer a generous returns policy, eg just replace the whole thing. Probability that 2 things are broken is very small, and you just made the customer think you’re better than you are, and it’s cheaper than improving QC. Everyone perceives you to be better than the company with no mistakes. Profit.
  - jessriedel 8y ago
    It seems sufficient to write off any trust you might have in that brand's name on account of the name only. That is, if Samsung's governance can't keep its employees or subsidiaries from lying with its name attached in the past, there's no reason to think they'd be able to do it in the future. This also incentivizes Samsung to police its underlings. Of course, you might have other reasons to like Samsung's stuff (reviews, prior experience), and you might also be stuck trusting no one because all large companies have similar issues (so you're forced to buy from untrusted brands).
  - amatecha 8y ago
    I mean, it was Samsung Brazil last time: https://www.diyphotography.net/samsung-busted-tweeting-stock-photos-to-promote-galaxy-a8-camera/ https://www.diyphotography.net/samsung-busted-tweeting-stock... But, yes. It doesn't take much for me to keep a note in my head "these guys are dishonest". OK, I may not boycott the company entirely, but it drops their perceived ranking in my mind wayyy down... which is exactly the opposite of what marketing is supposed to do, right?
  - reaperducer 8y ago
    I don't see why not. I won't buy a Samsung phone after what I read about its televisions spying on people. I don't care that they're other people in other divisions. If everything is so blissfully separate, then don't have a single brand.
  - olliej 8y ago
    Of course not - except in this case it’s multiple subsidiaries (Brazil, Malaysia, ...) which points to a systemic belief that faking a major feature is acceptable. If you’re going to advertise your camera, and you do it by showing off a photo taken with anything other than the actual camera, that’s fraud.
  - pavel_lishin 8y ago
    How many fuck-ups do you require before writing off a company? Would the entire board have to personally come and shit in your mailbox?
    - oh_sigh 8y ago
      The question isn't how many, but the scale of the fuck-up, and what it represents about the company. Maybe 5 people would have known that this ad campaign was using a non-phone-produced photo. Apparently that is enough for you to indict the 300,000+ people who work there.
      - mook 8y ago
        It's not indicting 300,000+ people, it's one person: the chairman of Samsung Electronics for not having set a culture where blatant lying results in negative repercussions.
        oh_sigh 8y ago
        Did you give him a chance to fire this marketing professional in Malaysia? 299,995/300,000 behave well. 5 people misbehave. Bad culture!
        pavel_lishin 8y ago
        5 people got caught misbehaving.
        megy 8y ago
        > 299,995/300,000 behave well. Can you prove that? These guys were caught, does it mean the others just haven't been caught yet? What about the G7 battery explosions? What about the washing machines catching fire? What about last time Samsung faked images? What about when they faked benchmarks?
        aaronbrethorst 8y ago
  - PascLeRasc 8y ago
    We don't owe companies anything. I'm a big proponent of not putting up with shitty design, and after a lot of bad experiences with Microsoft they're dead to me. I don't mind missing out on a good version of Windows sometime in the future, it's not worth dealing with their current awful software. Same goes for Samsung with the permanent Bixby button and Touchwiz UI. I'd rather reward good design like we have on the Google Pixel and iPhone X{'','R','S'} lines.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Personally, I've written all companies by default. Seeing things like that from both outside and sometimes inside, I came to conclusion that most sales&marketing material is simply full of shit, and unless your company gives me evidence otherwise, I'm assuming anything not casually verifiable is likely to be a lie. Also, RE Samsung vs. Samsung Malaysia, etc. - that's a flip side of having a brand. If you want various groups of people to inherit good reputation from the common pool of a brand, you should also expect they'll all inherit bad reputation too.
- mhb 8y ago
  Good luck buying a car.
  - kirykl 8y ago
    True many car ads are actually cgi
    - danpalmer 8y ago
      Yep, most are. In fact CGI effects studio The Mill have a shell of a car that can expand/contract to fit the proportions of most regular cars, that can record its surrounds enough to build the environment for rendering, and that can be driven in place of the real car when shooting. The car being advertised is then edited in over the top, using the recorded environment to ensure accurate lighting and colours. http://www.themill.com/portfolio/3002/the-blackbird http://www.themill.com/portfolio/3002/the-blackbird
      - jonas21 8y ago
        That's really cool! Here's a video with more details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnBC5bwV5y0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnBC5bwV5y0
        jscissr 8y ago
        I noticed the CGI cars in this clip don't have drivers in them. How would they add a driver for an actual ad? I think cars are much easier than humans to do photo-realistically in CGI. Or do they just show the car in a way such that you can't see that there's no driver?
        npunt 8y ago
        I'd assume they'd just use window tint if they're cheap, or the same stuff used in movies to drop actors in if they're not.
      - nathancahill 8y ago
- deleted 8y ago
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- ur-whale 8y ago
  This is a reaction I see a lot (and used to be tempted to have as well), but it is imo a mistake, grounded in the fact that we tend to think of companies as individuals whom once they've betrayed us, are likely to do so again. Companies like Samsung, while they claim to have a "culture" are, at the end of the day nothing but a large group of ever changing people, whose responsibilities in what the company does is quite often nil even when they are the one making them on the company' behalf. We can't deal with companies with tools nature equipped us with to deal with other humans.
  - ilamont 8y ago
    Organizations most definitely have their own cultures including codified practices, management frameworks, and a culture of "X." Patterns of behavior emerge from those cultures, and can lead to success or failure. It's been studied quite extensively - browse HBR.org to see research and theory about this. If you're fortunate, the company you deal with as a customer or employee has a culture that rewards competence and high standards of behavior. If you're not, you as an employee or customer or member of the public may suffer. Look at recent scandals involving Wells Fargo, Uber, police forces in certain cities, and others. Or companies that release crappy or copied products time after time. These aren't cases of "rogue employees" or "isolated cases." It's often a broken culture or one that encourages people to break rules, or even break the law. See https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/22/technology/uber-workplace-culture.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/22/technology/uber-workplace... about how this manifested itself with Uber.
    - ur-whale 8y ago
      This is only true insofar as the company remains small. As soon as it grows, the cultural standards you describe diverge. Google is the perfect example of this, where while they remained at a reasonable size adhered to their cultural standards staunchly. They've grown way past the point where that's sustainable and are now exhibiting the exact same predatory business attitude they swore they wouldn't ever (dragonfly, contracts for the military, systematic and all-encompassing spying on their customers, obvious anti-competitive practice in the android space, shameless support for a specific political party, etc...) That doesn't mean there isn't still some pockets of folks somewhere in there that play by the old rules. It just these business practices can't be wrapped under the "Google culture" umbrella anymore.
- folkhack 8y ago
  Yep - zero trust is exactly right... I bought a Samsung smart watch for Black Friday for $280-ish. Figured "hey - this will probably have better calendar/application support than my Garmin watch!" Nope. Literally can't get it to vibrate/alert when a notification comes through unless it's through Samsung's SPECIFIC applications. So my HipChat messages, Gmail inbox, etc have ZERO notifications even though it WILL show as a new notification on the watch face. Before anyone gives me crap saying "you screwed up the settings" - trust me, I didn't, and I've tried everything. I learned my lesson - Samsung is a faceless company with zero attention to user experience, and customer support. It is of no surprise that they outright lie about their features - which is EXACTLY what using a DSLR stock photo for this marketing is. An outright lie. I will stick with my Garmin devices from here on-out and am looking to switch ecosystems for my phone as I'm on an S8+ that disgusts me as a user (Bixby, bloatware blah blah). ZERO trust for Samsung.
  - 13of40 8y ago
    Heh - I was stuck at Costco getting tires installed the other day and ended up buying one of those watches. My favorite part so far is the Bixby app, which presents itself as a Siri-like assistant that collects all of my contacts and GPS data, because hey, but fails on everything I ask it, including dead simple questions like "Where's the closest Starbucks?"
    - folkhack 8y ago
      I'm just going to take a hammer to it. I know it's unreasonable but I'm that p'd off.
    - rhizome 8y ago
      My assumption is that the Bixby app is the point. It's the only way they can get recurring revenue out of you, the TV is a loss-leader to grease its installation.
  - dvlsg 8y ago
    I bought a Samsung phone (S9) over black Friday. Returned it already. Their apps were incredibly heavy handed and invasive. The photo app had a hard coded button on top of my camera viewing area which linked a way to buy things via a samsung app. I was appalled. I also couldn't turn off the Bixby assistant without first making a new Samsung account.
- mc32 8y ago
  Sometimes mfgs don’t have enough oversight over their creative agencies. Often agencies use interns for these kinds of image search —and things fall through the cracks. Not exculpating the mfgs or agencies just putting it out there that sometimes it’s some poor schlep who ends up holding the bag.
  - josho 8y ago
    The poor schlep did what his manager told him to do. The manager used the schlep because he wasn’t given budget to do it right. So, don’t excuse the behaviour the organization enabled it.
    - wpietri 8y ago
      Exactly. Companies have as much oversight on their agencies as they want. The problem is that companies don't care and shady agencies will do whatever is cheap. Every person in person in the chain is culpable here.
    - mattnewton 8y ago
      Can confirm at least that it can be done better than this. I used to work at Apple and you better believe they cared about details like this all the way up the chain. Every photo we used had to come from a marketing-blessed source, all modifications were auditable in source control, and the end result was blessed again by marketing.
      - scarejunba 8y ago
        What source control software did you use for the pictures?
        paulmd 8y ago
        you could probably version-control a lightroom catalog file... it's binary but you can still check in a binary file.
- Mikeb85 8y ago
  While Huawei may have cheated that particular phone's photo taking ability, I have a Huawei P20 Pro, and can vouch it's easily the best phone camera I've ever used or seen (it has triple Leica lenses). It doesn't match my Fuji mirrorless camera in some ways, but its shockingly good for a phone.
  - thirdsun 8y ago
    Doesn't that render the fake images even more silly? Smartphone cameras are pretty good these days - I don't see the need to fake the results.
- trumped 8y ago
  Its pretty hard to find a company that never lied in ads
  - sametmax 8y ago
    Which says a lot about the state of our legal systems.
    - trumped 8y ago
      a legal system where nobody knows the laws (the attorneys even have to specialize)
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Which is part of the reason why advertising is a cancer on society, and why it shows the ridiculous double standard we have on the societal level about exploiting people we know vs. total strangers.
  - mchannon 8y ago
    “Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.” -Thomas Jefferson
    - dllthomas 8y ago
      http://tjrs.monticello.org/letter/1289 http://tjrs.monticello.org/letter/1289
- paulgb 8y ago
  > I immediately thought of another recent case of a smartphone manufacturer faking their phone's camera shots[0] (turns out TFA links to it as well). In fact, TFA wrote the earlier article, which suggests a good rule for other companies thinking about doing this: before you buy the stock photo, check if the photographer has called other companies out on doing the exact same thing in the past :)
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
lostlogin 8y ago
The crazy thing is, their phones take amazing photos. Why do they need to fake it?
- setquk 8y ago
  Because they’re actually nowhere near as good as a DSLR and they want you to think they are.
- bryanlarsen 8y ago
  The same reason anybody uses a stock photo for anything. You can spend $10,000 and a bunch of time to rent a set, actors, techs and a photographer or you can spend $200 to buy a stock photo in a few minutes.
  - izzydata 8y ago
    Samsung must have a nice view from somewhere within walking distance of one of their buildings. How hard could it be to have the intern go snap some pictures. Perhaps hundreds of pictures and then choose the best.
    - sowbug 8y ago
      This works better if the interns are professional photographers.
      - Mtinie 8y ago
        So hire interns with a photography background? If they can build a rechargeable device which is capable of taking high-resolution photos without outside assistance they are more than capable, as a business, of figuring out the challenge of hiring the right people to support their engineering efforts. Edit: Or better yet, hire a professional photographer when you want to showcase the output of your high-end digital cameras.
        Rodneyj 8y ago
spuz 8y ago
There is a small disclaimer on Samsung's site: > The contents within the screen and images are simulated for illustrative purposes only. I don't really have a problem with Samsung using a higher res DSLR photo for the purposes of illustration of their background blur technology. I will always check review sites to get real sample images to evaluate a phone's camera technology. Edit: I assume this was downvoted because it comes across as cynical but that isn't what I meant to express at all. I don't expect companies to lie to me and I don't trust companies so little that I assume they would lie to me. I view this as more of an example of a company's marketing showing their product in the best possible light. It's clear most companies will want to do that so I prefer to go to review sights to get a better overview of the both the good and the bad before making a purchase decision.
- virusduck 8y ago
  But why would they simulate an image if the phone camera can produce the image they need??
  - TrainedMonkey 8y ago
    It could be because phone/camera software/etc are not ready yet when the marketing content is produced.
    - dawnerd 8y ago
      I don’t buy that one bit. They could easily change the disclaimer to say “photos are from pre-production hardware and may differ...”
    - spuz 8y ago
      Someone else replied to another comment here the most plausible explanation which is that it's much cheaper and quicker to simply photoshop a couple of different stock photos. To go out in the field even with a phone camera requires finding a model, a setting, a photographer and paying them for a day's wages. It's a lot easier to believe this is an instance of cost saving rather than savvy marketing.
deleted 8y ago
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21 8y ago
Does anybody buy a phone/car/... based on manufacturer ads? In a sense this is a self-selecting scam. If you don't check 3rd party reviews, then well, you get "advertised"
- adetrest 8y ago
  > Does anybody buy a phone/car/... based on manufacturer ads? In a sense this is a self-selecting scam. If you don't check 3rd party reviews, then well, you get "advertised" Yes, and that's exactly why ads are regulated (there are limits to what you claim your product can do), and why there is so much money in ads: they're designed to influence you and make you buy things that you might not otherwise.
- Sohcahtoa82 8y ago
  What a terrible victim-blaming view. Why is the onus on the consumer? Shouldn't the onus be on the business to produce an honest ad?
tasssko 8y ago
Samsung as a household brand is a disaster. I was relieved to scrap my 4 year old washing machine with 5 year warranty because of a Samsung guarantee fiasco (what do you do when they don’t respond for a few days and you have a household to run?). My 4in1 Samsung Lazer jet is also a disaster the WiFi drops off and never reconnects you have cut power reset. So this doesn’t surprise me at all.
hiven 8y ago
Never buy Samsung
btgis 8y ago
It doesn't look to me like they're pretending they took the picture with that phone. They are just using that photo as an example to show how the "background blur" feature works.
- acdha 8y ago
  Samsung pays for PR, why contribute your reputation pro bono? Everything on that section is talking about the phone. There are no disclaimers or the “simulation” notes ethical companies use.
  - FireBeyond 8y ago
    > There are no disclaimers or the “simulation” notes ethical companies use. Well, other than: > * All images are simulated for demo purpose. you mean...
    - acdha 8y ago
      I mean nothing anywhere near the images. An ethical company would not require you to scroll down a dozen more times to learn that the images you’d been looking at for the last 20 screens were all fake. Samsung does that because they know almost nobody will read tiny text buried in a de-emphasized paragraph and the few who do probably won’t fully discount the full impression.
sschueller 8y ago
Kind of lazy for Samsung to do that when their phones and others manufactures actually can take some astonishing pictures. But even Apple "cheats" a bit with their photos which are shot on an actual iPhone. [1] [1] https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2017/06/shotoniphone-800x465.jpg https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2017/06/shotoniphone-80...
- gehsty 8y ago
  Wow never seen that before any idea what it / is how it works? Just a fancy lens mount? I would have thought the tiny focal length of the iPhone camera would make any lens a bit of a disaster...but I guess apple could have one made with all that cash they have :)
- bscphil 8y ago
  That's not an iPhone in the picture, is it?
  - colejohnson66 8y ago
    If it is, it’s not the stock camera app
IAmGraydon 8y ago
Who cares? They disclose the fact that the photo wasn’t taken with the phone right on the page. It’s for illustrative purposes, not to show the exact quality of the phone’s functions. The author of this blog also just outed a paying client. If they paid, they can use it however they like (within the terms of the licensing agreement). This is a great way for the author to ensure they never sell another photo to a large company.
- gowld 8y ago
  Anyone cares if they want to know how a phone performs on its advertised function.
  - IAmGraydon 8y ago
    Interesting. So you normally get a feel for how a 16MP camera works by looking at low resolution photos? Personally, I go find full resolution photos posted by countless users and blogs who critique tech products. Do you also get upset when your fast food doesn’t look exactly like the image on the website? How about when your hotel room doesn’t have the exact same gloss as that photo on their website? Again, they fully disclosed that the photo was not intended to show the quality of the camera. How can you claim they’re being deceptive? You are choosing to interpret the photo in a way that was never intended.
    - wDCzI78WRQaC1e3 8y ago
      Is there any level of disclosure that you would regard as not full? As in, let's say the disclosure is in 6pt font at the very bottom of the page, below all the marketing material. In grey. And 50% transparent. Is it enough that the content is included somewhere in the source of the page, and however it's presented doesn't matter?
- acdha 8y ago
  They hide the note in very small text a long way down the page – way past all of the big, attention grabbing pictures, knowing that most people aren’t going to read down that far and consciously discount everything they saw. Do you have a citation for the assertion that this was a paying client? She clearly says the opposite in the post.
dawnerd 8y ago
Samsung just isn’t a company you can trust. Period. The only consumer product they make that’s even half decent are their SSDs and even those are starting to lose to competitors. Their TVs alone have had so many instances of them injecting ads into the ui, to spying on what you watch in plex, and many more. Last thing I’d want from Samsung is a phone.
- dmix 8y ago
  I thought Samsung phones were highly regarded by consumers?
  - larkeith 8y ago
    The hardware is solid. The software is atrocious. I suspect part of the reason they still have a fairly good reputation is that they really were some of the best Android phones available, a few years ago, but by now they're nothing remarkable (unless you're going by quantity of bloatware).
- cauldron 8y ago
  Their "MLC" marketing is cheeky
- namibj 8y ago
  Can you recommend any other SSDs, or some site that has meaningful tail latency/MTBF data? I don't like sticking to them for SSDs, but I have yet to hear of one breaking, compared to a bunch of other name brands.
  - dawnerd 8y ago
    I wish I had some good suggestions myself but every other brand I’ve tried just hasn’t really kept up. Been having some good luck with an hp nvme (can’t recall model right now) but I suspect it’s probably just using Samsung memory
  - kup0 8y ago
    Indeed, I have an old 64GB 830 that is still working as if it's brand new. So far I've had good experience with Crucial MX series, PNY CS11xx series of drives (YMMV widely depending on series, etc) and Sandisk, all have lasted through quite some use, but honestly I still prefer Samsung or Intel. I've been using the Crucial drive for long enough now that I'd probably make them a top choice too. Samsung, Intel, Crucial would be my top 3. I've been running a Western Digital nvme for a couple of weeks now and it's great- but that says nothing about longevity. The speed of nvme is incredible though, so I really hope this drive lasts.
stunt 8y ago
Marketing and HR are probably the worst departments in most of the businesses.
earth2mars 8y ago
Shamesung
- k_sze 8y ago
  Also: Shamsung
foobaw 8y ago
This definitely requires someone that was lazy independently doing this. This definitely does not reflect a common practice that Samsung does. Someone high up will be heavily punished for this.
ezoe 8y ago
Seriously, How did they not think about busting. Like... they didn't know that there is a Google search?
microcolonel 8y ago
Wow, I must say I am surprised that something this seemingly-fraudulent managed to make it to the public website. I'm interested to see what Samsung has to say about this, hard to give them the benefit of the doubt, even if it's possible it's just a "marketer went too far" or "The images went from the mockup to the live site before engineering sent the samples". If this feature works even remotely as advertised, they could have gotten at least a couple shots (and saved the intermediate images, I guess, to do the before/after).
mehrdadn 8y ago
Isn't false advertising illegal in the US? How do they get away with this?
- slantyyz 8y ago
  As far as I can tell, the doctored image is used only on images for a handful of Asian countries - Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia. I don't think US laws would apply in those places.
  - mehrdadn 8y ago
    Ahh I got the impression it was in the US, thanks!
ljp_206 8y ago
These sorts of 'illustrative only' graphics get pumped out every day in marketing design, even for large brand names. As a young junior designer, I once had a creative director ask me to use a Samsung phone asset to illustrate how 'Bixby Vision' or whatever it was called worked. He wanted an Asian language text in the background on a menu with the phone in the front, showing translated text. I attempted to comply with his request for a little while before pushing back gently; I was a greenhorn in the industry and didn't have a great relationship with the CD anyway. Thankfully nothing came of it and we moved forward with another concept. But I was appalled at the time that he would have wanted me to grab seemingly anything off of Google Translate and create a graphic representing how the phone would supposedly work, all of which I was extremely uncomfortable doing. But I suppose he saw it as an extension of our other usage of stock imagery and device assets.
kawsper 8y ago
I think EyeEm and Getty should work on their integrations, it can't be right that an can't know for sure who licensed their work. I could see cases where the artist might be wondering if their picture is legitimately being used by someone, or if they should get legal advice.
deleted 8y ago
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ttty 8y ago
Well iPhone ads use DSLR lens in front of the iPhone. A bit closer to reality, but net effects are the same, fake advertising. This is not to excuse Samsung, it's just to remember that most of the companies does that and all should be mentioned, not just one.
- nomagicbullet 8y ago
  Do you have a source?
- pembrook 8y ago
  Not sure what you’re talking about. If you go on the iPhone pages of the Apple website you can clearly see the same artifacting, noise patterns, and lens distortion from both the native iPhone sensor and native wide angle and portrait lenses. I am 100% positive they did not use lens attachments in those photos. Also, the lens adapters don’t make the photo quality “better.” They just have the ability to modify the focal length.
- briandear 8y ago
  False. Even the iPhone billboards were shot with iPhone without “attachments.” Time magazine had covers shot on iPhone without attachments. http://time.com/4921227/time-magazine-covers-shot-on-iphone/ http://time.com/4921227/time-magazine-covers-shot-on-iphone/
- hacym 8y ago
  I find it funny that people care about the equipment a photo is taken on. Those photos are taken by professional photographers with professional lighting setups and professional models. I subscribe to Ken Rockwell's belief that you don't need a fancy camera to take a good photo, you just need to be a good photographer [0]. I used to sell cameras in high school/college, and ALWAYS steered people away from DSLRs/high megapixel cameras that flaunt the quality of their cameras. Likely, those people will never get close to needing a high-quality camera's features, and their purchase of one would almost always result in a return. [0] https://kenrockwell.com/tech/150-vs-5000-dollar-camera.htm https://kenrockwell.com/tech/150-vs-5000-dollar-camera.htm
tooltalk 8y ago
For a company with $10+B annual marketing budget, the company awfully is careless about little things that could destroy their reputation.
torgian 8y ago
This isn’t really new. Samsung bought (allegedly) his stock photo and used it. Nothing illegal with that, though it potentially could be false advertising. I feel like all phone companies use dslr photos, or photos they didn’t even take with the phone, to advertise how great their cameras are. Sad state of the world we are in. Everyone lies
wodenokoto 8y ago
Even Nokia was caught faking their image stabilizer. In the video allegedly filmed with one of the phones, you could see a big professional camera rig in the reflection of a car window ...

669 points by minikites 8y ago

Ah man, I immediately thought of another recent case of a smartphone manufacturer faking their phone's camera shots[0] (turns out TFA links to it as well). Just a single instance of this kind of fraud is enough for me to write off a brand forever, frankly. If you're lying to my face before I even bought your product, who knows how much else you're lying about. Zero trust for companies like this. [0] https://www.diyphotography.net/huawei-passes-off-dslr-photos-as-smartphone-camera-photos-again/ https://www.diyphotography.net/huawei-passes-off-dslr-photos...

bryanlarsen 8y ago
You'd write off an entire massive company for the mistakes of Hauwei Egypt or Samsung Malaysia? It's not like this is central company policy, it's the people localizing the marketing.
- ancorevard 8y ago
  They reflect company values and culture. If this was the first incident, then I would tend to agree with you. But this is just one of a long string of similar incidents that together form a pattern that reflect on the company values.
  - sandworm101 8y ago
    >> They reflect company values and culture. If it was from Samsung. This could have come down to a single decision by a very low-level person, or likely a contractor. Samsung's marketing execs dropped the ball in not supervising the campaign properly, but I'm not ready to fault Samsung generally because of a dozen poorly-managed publicity shots. Instead, I judge them by how they react to this mistake. Do they pull the photos or not?
    - wpietri 8y ago
      This sort of thinking on brands is always a puzzle to me. Samsung certainly takes credit for every good thing done by their employees and contractors. Why does a radically different standard apply when they do something bad? Even if it made sense in some light, it's still a bad approach, because it means people with power and money are never held accountable for things that happen on their watch.
      - sandworm101 8y ago
        We hold them to account by not purchasing their products. But we call out the mistake for what it is: underhanded marketing. It isn't like they installed spyware or were handing personal data to foreign governments.
        TeMPOraL 8y ago
        > But we call out the mistake for what it is: underhanded marketing. Let's call it for what it really is, then: lying in your face, at scale. > We hold them to account by not purchasing their products. Totally agreed. That's one of few ways to send them feedback directly. Other ways would include lawsuits or voting for regulation change. Given that signal here is roughly proportional to amount of lost market share, complaints in this thread are a fully legit, if indirect way, of getting more people to maybe buy less of their products.
      - 2muchcoffeeman 8y ago
        I’ve read the same kind of ‘logic’ applies to lots of situations. People will judge a company or restaurant or whatever more favourably if they correct a mistake to their satisfaction, rather than not making mistakes at all. It’s makes me wonder how many companies are hacking this. Don’t worry about quality past a certain point. Say everything works 95% of the time. After that, just offer a generous returns policy, eg just replace the whole thing. Probability that 2 things are broken is very small, and you just made the customer think you’re better than you are, and it’s cheaper than improving QC. Everyone perceives you to be better than the company with no mistakes. Profit.
- jessriedel 8y ago
  It seems sufficient to write off any trust you might have in that brand's name on account of the name only. That is, if Samsung's governance can't keep its employees or subsidiaries from lying with its name attached in the past, there's no reason to think they'd be able to do it in the future. This also incentivizes Samsung to police its underlings. Of course, you might have other reasons to like Samsung's stuff (reviews, prior experience), and you might also be stuck trusting no one because all large companies have similar issues (so you're forced to buy from untrusted brands).
- amatecha 8y ago
  I mean, it was Samsung Brazil last time: https://www.diyphotography.net/samsung-busted-tweeting-stock-photos-to-promote-galaxy-a8-camera/ https://www.diyphotography.net/samsung-busted-tweeting-stock... But, yes. It doesn't take much for me to keep a note in my head "these guys are dishonest". OK, I may not boycott the company entirely, but it drops their perceived ranking in my mind wayyy down... which is exactly the opposite of what marketing is supposed to do, right?
- reaperducer 8y ago
  I don't see why not. I won't buy a Samsung phone after what I read about its televisions spying on people. I don't care that they're other people in other divisions. If everything is so blissfully separate, then don't have a single brand.
- olliej 8y ago
  Of course not - except in this case it’s multiple subsidiaries (Brazil, Malaysia, ...) which points to a systemic belief that faking a major feature is acceptable. If you’re going to advertise your camera, and you do it by showing off a photo taken with anything other than the actual camera, that’s fraud.
- pavel_lishin 8y ago
  How many fuck-ups do you require before writing off a company? Would the entire board have to personally come and shit in your mailbox?
  - oh_sigh 8y ago
    The question isn't how many, but the scale of the fuck-up, and what it represents about the company. Maybe 5 people would have known that this ad campaign was using a non-phone-produced photo. Apparently that is enough for you to indict the 300,000+ people who work there.
    - mook 8y ago
      It's not indicting 300,000+ people, it's one person: the chairman of Samsung Electronics for not having set a culture where blatant lying results in negative repercussions.
      - oh_sigh 8y ago
        Did you give him a chance to fire this marketing professional in Malaysia? 299,995/300,000 behave well. 5 people misbehave. Bad culture!
        pavel_lishin 8y ago
        5 people got caught misbehaving.
        megy 8y ago
        > 299,995/300,000 behave well. Can you prove that? These guys were caught, does it mean the others just haven't been caught yet? What about the G7 battery explosions? What about the washing machines catching fire? What about last time Samsung faked images? What about when they faked benchmarks?
        aaronbrethorst 8y ago
- PascLeRasc 8y ago
  We don't owe companies anything. I'm a big proponent of not putting up with shitty design, and after a lot of bad experiences with Microsoft they're dead to me. I don't mind missing out on a good version of Windows sometime in the future, it's not worth dealing with their current awful software. Same goes for Samsung with the permanent Bixby button and Touchwiz UI. I'd rather reward good design like we have on the Google Pixel and iPhone X{'','R','S'} lines.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Personally, I've written all companies by default. Seeing things like that from both outside and sometimes inside, I came to conclusion that most sales&marketing material is simply full of shit, and unless your company gives me evidence otherwise, I'm assuming anything not casually verifiable is likely to be a lie. Also, RE Samsung vs. Samsung Malaysia, etc. - that's a flip side of having a brand. If you want various groups of people to inherit good reputation from the common pool of a brand, you should also expect they'll all inherit bad reputation too.
mhb 8y ago
Good luck buying a car.
- kirykl 8y ago
  True many car ads are actually cgi
  - danpalmer 8y ago
    Yep, most are. In fact CGI effects studio The Mill have a shell of a car that can expand/contract to fit the proportions of most regular cars, that can record its surrounds enough to build the environment for rendering, and that can be driven in place of the real car when shooting. The car being advertised is then edited in over the top, using the recorded environment to ensure accurate lighting and colours. http://www.themill.com/portfolio/3002/the-blackbird http://www.themill.com/portfolio/3002/the-blackbird
    - jonas21 8y ago
      That's really cool! Here's a video with more details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnBC5bwV5y0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnBC5bwV5y0
      - jscissr 8y ago
        I noticed the CGI cars in this clip don't have drivers in them. How would they add a driver for an actual ad? I think cars are much easier than humans to do photo-realistically in CGI. Or do they just show the car in a way such that you can't see that there's no driver?
        npunt 8y ago
        I'd assume they'd just use window tint if they're cheap, or the same stuff used in movies to drop actors in if they're not.
    - nathancahill 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
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ur-whale 8y ago
This is a reaction I see a lot (and used to be tempted to have as well), but it is imo a mistake, grounded in the fact that we tend to think of companies as individuals whom once they've betrayed us, are likely to do so again. Companies like Samsung, while they claim to have a "culture" are, at the end of the day nothing but a large group of ever changing people, whose responsibilities in what the company does is quite often nil even when they are the one making them on the company' behalf. We can't deal with companies with tools nature equipped us with to deal with other humans.
- ilamont 8y ago
  Organizations most definitely have their own cultures including codified practices, management frameworks, and a culture of "X." Patterns of behavior emerge from those cultures, and can lead to success or failure. It's been studied quite extensively - browse HBR.org to see research and theory about this. If you're fortunate, the company you deal with as a customer or employee has a culture that rewards competence and high standards of behavior. If you're not, you as an employee or customer or member of the public may suffer. Look at recent scandals involving Wells Fargo, Uber, police forces in certain cities, and others. Or companies that release crappy or copied products time after time. These aren't cases of "rogue employees" or "isolated cases." It's often a broken culture or one that encourages people to break rules, or even break the law. See https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/22/technology/uber-workplace-culture.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/22/technology/uber-workplace... about how this manifested itself with Uber.
  - ur-whale 8y ago
    This is only true insofar as the company remains small. As soon as it grows, the cultural standards you describe diverge. Google is the perfect example of this, where while they remained at a reasonable size adhered to their cultural standards staunchly. They've grown way past the point where that's sustainable and are now exhibiting the exact same predatory business attitude they swore they wouldn't ever (dragonfly, contracts for the military, systematic and all-encompassing spying on their customers, obvious anti-competitive practice in the android space, shameless support for a specific political party, etc...) That doesn't mean there isn't still some pockets of folks somewhere in there that play by the old rules. It just these business practices can't be wrapped under the "Google culture" umbrella anymore.
folkhack 8y ago
Yep - zero trust is exactly right... I bought a Samsung smart watch for Black Friday for $280-ish. Figured "hey - this will probably have better calendar/application support than my Garmin watch!" Nope. Literally can't get it to vibrate/alert when a notification comes through unless it's through Samsung's SPECIFIC applications. So my HipChat messages, Gmail inbox, etc have ZERO notifications even though it WILL show as a new notification on the watch face. Before anyone gives me crap saying "you screwed up the settings" - trust me, I didn't, and I've tried everything. I learned my lesson - Samsung is a faceless company with zero attention to user experience, and customer support. It is of no surprise that they outright lie about their features - which is EXACTLY what using a DSLR stock photo for this marketing is. An outright lie. I will stick with my Garmin devices from here on-out and am looking to switch ecosystems for my phone as I'm on an S8+ that disgusts me as a user (Bixby, bloatware blah blah). ZERO trust for Samsung.
- 13of40 8y ago
  Heh - I was stuck at Costco getting tires installed the other day and ended up buying one of those watches. My favorite part so far is the Bixby app, which presents itself as a Siri-like assistant that collects all of my contacts and GPS data, because hey, but fails on everything I ask it, including dead simple questions like "Where's the closest Starbucks?"
  - folkhack 8y ago
    I'm just going to take a hammer to it. I know it's unreasonable but I'm that p'd off.
  - rhizome 8y ago
    My assumption is that the Bixby app is the point. It's the only way they can get recurring revenue out of you, the TV is a loss-leader to grease its installation.
- dvlsg 8y ago
  I bought a Samsung phone (S9) over black Friday. Returned it already. Their apps were incredibly heavy handed and invasive. The photo app had a hard coded button on top of my camera viewing area which linked a way to buy things via a samsung app. I was appalled. I also couldn't turn off the Bixby assistant without first making a new Samsung account.
mc32 8y ago
Sometimes mfgs don’t have enough oversight over their creative agencies. Often agencies use interns for these kinds of image search —and things fall through the cracks. Not exculpating the mfgs or agencies just putting it out there that sometimes it’s some poor schlep who ends up holding the bag.
- josho 8y ago
  The poor schlep did what his manager told him to do. The manager used the schlep because he wasn’t given budget to do it right. So, don’t excuse the behaviour the organization enabled it.
  - wpietri 8y ago
    Exactly. Companies have as much oversight on their agencies as they want. The problem is that companies don't care and shady agencies will do whatever is cheap. Every person in person in the chain is culpable here.
  - mattnewton 8y ago
    Can confirm at least that it can be done better than this. I used to work at Apple and you better believe they cared about details like this all the way up the chain. Every photo we used had to come from a marketing-blessed source, all modifications were auditable in source control, and the end result was blessed again by marketing.
    - scarejunba 8y ago
      What source control software did you use for the pictures?
      - paulmd 8y ago
        you could probably version-control a lightroom catalog file... it's binary but you can still check in a binary file.
Mikeb85 8y ago
While Huawei may have cheated that particular phone's photo taking ability, I have a Huawei P20 Pro, and can vouch it's easily the best phone camera I've ever used or seen (it has triple Leica lenses). It doesn't match my Fuji mirrorless camera in some ways, but its shockingly good for a phone.
- thirdsun 8y ago
  Doesn't that render the fake images even more silly? Smartphone cameras are pretty good these days - I don't see the need to fake the results.
trumped 8y ago
Its pretty hard to find a company that never lied in ads
- sametmax 8y ago
  Which says a lot about the state of our legal systems.
  - trumped 8y ago
    a legal system where nobody knows the laws (the attorneys even have to specialize)
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Which is part of the reason why advertising is a cancer on society, and why it shows the ridiculous double standard we have on the societal level about exploiting people we know vs. total strangers.
- mchannon 8y ago
  “Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.” -Thomas Jefferson
  - dllthomas 8y ago
    http://tjrs.monticello.org/letter/1289 http://tjrs.monticello.org/letter/1289
paulgb 8y ago
> I immediately thought of another recent case of a smartphone manufacturer faking their phone's camera shots[0] (turns out TFA links to it as well). In fact, TFA wrote the earlier article, which suggests a good rule for other companies thinking about doing this: before you buy the stock photo, check if the photographer has called other companies out on doing the exact same thing in the past :)
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

lostlogin 8y ago

The crazy thing is, their phones take amazing photos. Why do they need to fake it?

setquk 8y ago
Because they’re actually nowhere near as good as a DSLR and they want you to think they are.
bryanlarsen 8y ago
The same reason anybody uses a stock photo for anything. You can spend $10,000 and a bunch of time to rent a set, actors, techs and a photographer or you can spend $200 to buy a stock photo in a few minutes.
- izzydata 8y ago
  Samsung must have a nice view from somewhere within walking distance of one of their buildings. How hard could it be to have the intern go snap some pictures. Perhaps hundreds of pictures and then choose the best.
  - sowbug 8y ago
    This works better if the interns are professional photographers.
    - Mtinie 8y ago
      So hire interns with a photography background? If they can build a rechargeable device which is capable of taking high-resolution photos without outside assistance they are more than capable, as a business, of figuring out the challenge of hiring the right people to support their engineering efforts. Edit: Or better yet, hire a professional photographer when you want to showcase the output of your high-end digital cameras.
      - Rodneyj 8y ago

spuz 8y ago

There is a small disclaimer on Samsung's site: > The contents within the screen and images are simulated for illustrative purposes only. I don't really have a problem with Samsung using a higher res DSLR photo for the purposes of illustration of their background blur technology. I will always check review sites to get real sample images to evaluate a phone's camera technology. Edit: I assume this was downvoted because it comes across as cynical but that isn't what I meant to express at all. I don't expect companies to lie to me and I don't trust companies so little that I assume they would lie to me. I view this as more of an example of a company's marketing showing their product in the best possible light. It's clear most companies will want to do that so I prefer to go to review sights to get a better overview of the both the good and the bad before making a purchase decision.

virusduck 8y ago
But why would they simulate an image if the phone camera can produce the image they need??
- TrainedMonkey 8y ago
  It could be because phone/camera software/etc are not ready yet when the marketing content is produced.
  - dawnerd 8y ago
    I don’t buy that one bit. They could easily change the disclaimer to say “photos are from pre-production hardware and may differ...”
  - spuz 8y ago
    Someone else replied to another comment here the most plausible explanation which is that it's much cheaper and quicker to simply photoshop a couple of different stock photos. To go out in the field even with a phone camera requires finding a model, a setting, a photographer and paying them for a day's wages. It's a lot easier to believe this is an instance of cost saving rather than savvy marketing.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

21 8y ago

Does anybody buy a phone/car/... based on manufacturer ads? In a sense this is a self-selecting scam. If you don't check 3rd party reviews, then well, you get "advertised"

adetrest 8y ago
> Does anybody buy a phone/car/... based on manufacturer ads? In a sense this is a self-selecting scam. If you don't check 3rd party reviews, then well, you get "advertised" Yes, and that's exactly why ads are regulated (there are limits to what you claim your product can do), and why there is so much money in ads: they're designed to influence you and make you buy things that you might not otherwise.
Sohcahtoa82 8y ago
What a terrible victim-blaming view. Why is the onus on the consumer? Shouldn't the onus be on the business to produce an honest ad?

tasssko 8y ago

Samsung as a household brand is a disaster. I was relieved to scrap my 4 year old washing machine with 5 year warranty because of a Samsung guarantee fiasco (what do you do when they don’t respond for a few days and you have a household to run?). My 4in1 Samsung Lazer jet is also a disaster the WiFi drops off and never reconnects you have cut power reset. So this doesn’t surprise me at all.

hiven 8y ago

Never buy Samsung

btgis 8y ago

It doesn't look to me like they're pretending they took the picture with that phone. They are just using that photo as an example to show how the "background blur" feature works.

acdha 8y ago
Samsung pays for PR, why contribute your reputation pro bono? Everything on that section is talking about the phone. There are no disclaimers or the “simulation” notes ethical companies use.
- FireBeyond 8y ago
  > There are no disclaimers or the “simulation” notes ethical companies use. Well, other than: > * All images are simulated for demo purpose. you mean...
  - acdha 8y ago
    I mean nothing anywhere near the images. An ethical company would not require you to scroll down a dozen more times to learn that the images you’d been looking at for the last 20 screens were all fake. Samsung does that because they know almost nobody will read tiny text buried in a de-emphasized paragraph and the few who do probably won’t fully discount the full impression.

sschueller 8y ago

Kind of lazy for Samsung to do that when their phones and others manufactures actually can take some astonishing pictures. But even Apple "cheats" a bit with their photos which are shot on an actual iPhone. [1] [1] https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2017/06/shotoniphone-800x465.jpg https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2017/06/shotoniphone-80...

gehsty 8y ago
Wow never seen that before any idea what it / is how it works? Just a fancy lens mount? I would have thought the tiny focal length of the iPhone camera would make any lens a bit of a disaster...but I guess apple could have one made with all that cash they have :)
bscphil 8y ago
That's not an iPhone in the picture, is it?
- colejohnson66 8y ago
  If it is, it’s not the stock camera app

IAmGraydon 8y ago

Who cares? They disclose the fact that the photo wasn’t taken with the phone right on the page. It’s for illustrative purposes, not to show the exact quality of the phone’s functions. The author of this blog also just outed a paying client. If they paid, they can use it however they like (within the terms of the licensing agreement). This is a great way for the author to ensure they never sell another photo to a large company.

gowld 8y ago
Anyone cares if they want to know how a phone performs on its advertised function.
- IAmGraydon 8y ago
  Interesting. So you normally get a feel for how a 16MP camera works by looking at low resolution photos? Personally, I go find full resolution photos posted by countless users and blogs who critique tech products. Do you also get upset when your fast food doesn’t look exactly like the image on the website? How about when your hotel room doesn’t have the exact same gloss as that photo on their website? Again, they fully disclosed that the photo was not intended to show the quality of the camera. How can you claim they’re being deceptive? You are choosing to interpret the photo in a way that was never intended.
  - wDCzI78WRQaC1e3 8y ago
    Is there any level of disclosure that you would regard as not full? As in, let's say the disclosure is in 6pt font at the very bottom of the page, below all the marketing material. In grey. And 50% transparent. Is it enough that the content is included somewhere in the source of the page, and however it's presented doesn't matter?
acdha 8y ago
They hide the note in very small text a long way down the page – way past all of the big, attention grabbing pictures, knowing that most people aren’t going to read down that far and consciously discount everything they saw. Do you have a citation for the assertion that this was a paying client? She clearly says the opposite in the post.

dawnerd 8y ago

Samsung just isn’t a company you can trust. Period. The only consumer product they make that’s even half decent are their SSDs and even those are starting to lose to competitors. Their TVs alone have had so many instances of them injecting ads into the ui, to spying on what you watch in plex, and many more. Last thing I’d want from Samsung is a phone.

dmix 8y ago
I thought Samsung phones were highly regarded by consumers?
- larkeith 8y ago
  The hardware is solid. The software is atrocious. I suspect part of the reason they still have a fairly good reputation is that they really were some of the best Android phones available, a few years ago, but by now they're nothing remarkable (unless you're going by quantity of bloatware).
cauldron 8y ago
Their "MLC" marketing is cheeky
namibj 8y ago
Can you recommend any other SSDs, or some site that has meaningful tail latency/MTBF data? I don't like sticking to them for SSDs, but I have yet to hear of one breaking, compared to a bunch of other name brands.
- dawnerd 8y ago
  I wish I had some good suggestions myself but every other brand I’ve tried just hasn’t really kept up. Been having some good luck with an hp nvme (can’t recall model right now) but I suspect it’s probably just using Samsung memory
- kup0 8y ago
  Indeed, I have an old 64GB 830 that is still working as if it's brand new. So far I've had good experience with Crucial MX series, PNY CS11xx series of drives (YMMV widely depending on series, etc) and Sandisk, all have lasted through quite some use, but honestly I still prefer Samsung or Intel. I've been using the Crucial drive for long enough now that I'd probably make them a top choice too. Samsung, Intel, Crucial would be my top 3. I've been running a Western Digital nvme for a couple of weeks now and it's great- but that says nothing about longevity. The speed of nvme is incredible though, so I really hope this drive lasts.

stunt 8y ago

Marketing and HR are probably the worst departments in most of the businesses.

earth2mars 8y ago

Shamesung

k_sze 8y ago
Also: Shamsung

foobaw 8y ago

This definitely requires someone that was lazy independently doing this. This definitely does not reflect a common practice that Samsung does. Someone high up will be heavily punished for this.

ezoe 8y ago

Seriously, How did they not think about busting. Like... they didn't know that there is a Google search?

microcolonel 8y ago

Wow, I must say I am surprised that something this seemingly-fraudulent managed to make it to the public website. I'm interested to see what Samsung has to say about this, hard to give them the benefit of the doubt, even if it's possible it's just a "marketer went too far" or "The images went from the mockup to the live site before engineering sent the samples". If this feature works even remotely as advertised, they could have gotten at least a couple shots (and saved the intermediate images, I guess, to do the before/after).

mehrdadn 8y ago

Isn't false advertising illegal in the US? How do they get away with this?

slantyyz 8y ago
As far as I can tell, the doctored image is used only on images for a handful of Asian countries - Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia. I don't think US laws would apply in those places.
- mehrdadn 8y ago
  Ahh I got the impression it was in the US, thanks!

ljp_206 8y ago

These sorts of 'illustrative only' graphics get pumped out every day in marketing design, even for large brand names. As a young junior designer, I once had a creative director ask me to use a Samsung phone asset to illustrate how 'Bixby Vision' or whatever it was called worked. He wanted an Asian language text in the background on a menu with the phone in the front, showing translated text. I attempted to comply with his request for a little while before pushing back gently; I was a greenhorn in the industry and didn't have a great relationship with the CD anyway. Thankfully nothing came of it and we moved forward with another concept. But I was appalled at the time that he would have wanted me to grab seemingly anything off of Google Translate and create a graphic representing how the phone would supposedly work, all of which I was extremely uncomfortable doing. But I suppose he saw it as an extension of our other usage of stock imagery and device assets.

kawsper 8y ago

I think EyeEm and Getty should work on their integrations, it can't be right that an can't know for sure who licensed their work. I could see cases where the artist might be wondering if their picture is legitimately being used by someone, or if they should get legal advice.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

ttty 8y ago

Well iPhone ads use DSLR lens in front of the iPhone. A bit closer to reality, but net effects are the same, fake advertising. This is not to excuse Samsung, it's just to remember that most of the companies does that and all should be mentioned, not just one.

nomagicbullet 8y ago
Do you have a source?
pembrook 8y ago
Not sure what you’re talking about. If you go on the iPhone pages of the Apple website you can clearly see the same artifacting, noise patterns, and lens distortion from both the native iPhone sensor and native wide angle and portrait lenses. I am 100% positive they did not use lens attachments in those photos. Also, the lens adapters don’t make the photo quality “better.” They just have the ability to modify the focal length.
briandear 8y ago
False. Even the iPhone billboards were shot with iPhone without “attachments.” Time magazine had covers shot on iPhone without attachments. http://time.com/4921227/time-magazine-covers-shot-on-iphone/ http://time.com/4921227/time-magazine-covers-shot-on-iphone/
hacym 8y ago
I find it funny that people care about the equipment a photo is taken on. Those photos are taken by professional photographers with professional lighting setups and professional models. I subscribe to Ken Rockwell's belief that you don't need a fancy camera to take a good photo, you just need to be a good photographer [0]. I used to sell cameras in high school/college, and ALWAYS steered people away from DSLRs/high megapixel cameras that flaunt the quality of their cameras. Likely, those people will never get close to needing a high-quality camera's features, and their purchase of one would almost always result in a return. [0] https://kenrockwell.com/tech/150-vs-5000-dollar-camera.htm https://kenrockwell.com/tech/150-vs-5000-dollar-camera.htm

tooltalk 8y ago

For a company with $10+B annual marketing budget, the company awfully is careless about little things that could destroy their reputation.

torgian 8y ago

This isn’t really new. Samsung bought (allegedly) his stock photo and used it. Nothing illegal with that, though it potentially could be false advertising. I feel like all phone companies use dslr photos, or photos they didn’t even take with the phone, to advertise how great their cameras are. Sad state of the world we are in. Everyone lies

wodenokoto 8y ago

Even Nokia was caught faking their image stabilizer. In the video allegedly filmed with one of the phones, you could see a big professional camera rig in the reflection of a car window ...