While it’s no secret that the cameras on our smartphones are more advanced than they were several years ago, there’s just no beating the image quality produced by a full-frame DSLR camera. In the case of Huawei, the company decidedly used a DSLR camera to take what was supposed to be selfie camera shots during a commercial shoot for its Nova 3 smartphone.
According to sources, the behind-the-scene shot of the commercial shoot was taken and posted on Instagram by Sarah Elshamy, the actress who appears in the Huawei Mobile Egypt video advertisement. In the video, the actress is beside her fellow actor who, in all the scenes, takes a selfie shot with the Nova 3’s front-facing camera.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=30&v=2Kf7g2XEWwI
But as you can see from the image below, it’s quite clear that the supposed “fun selfie” that was captured using the Nova 3 was in fact a carefully created shot captured on a DSLR, complete with a professional photographer behind it. More to the point, the Nova 3 is clearly nowhere to be seen.
Elshamy’s Instagram post has since been deleted. To be fair, and as pointed out by The Verge, neither Huawei nor the video advertisement claimed that the selfie in questions were ever captured by the Nova 3. Having said that, it can also be argued that the video advertisement itself heavily implied that the phone was capable of such pictures.
At the time of writing, Huawei had yet to issue a statement regarding its Nova 3 advertisement.
Update (21 August 2018, 7:15PM): Huawei released a statement in regards to the report. According to the company, a disclaimer situated at the end of the video states that all the “selfie shots” taken in the video were merely for reference, and that the primary purpose of the advertisement was to demonstrate how its consumers could nest use the features (read: AI Camera) of the Huawei Nova 3 and Nova 3i smartphones.
