Samsung used a photograph taken with a professional camera (DSLR) to illustrate the camera capabilities of its Galaxy A8 Star, a mid-range smartphone that the company sells to various parts of the world. The image was posted on the Samsung Malaysia website and seems to suggest that it was made with a mobile phone, rather than a classic camera. The texts accompanying the image are rather vague and do not explicitly say that it was made with a Galaxy A8 Star, but there are several wordings that still make it understood.
The misleading use of photography was noticed by Dunja Djudjic, the author of the photograph, who confirmed that she had made it some time ago with a digital camera and not with a Samsung smartphone. On DIY Photography, Djudjic said that he had posted his image on the photo storage and sharing site EyeEm, which had then selected some of his photos to include them in the catalog of the Getty Images photo agency. Djudjic had then received an email in which she was informed that her photo had been purchased by someone, but without having many other details.
A few days later Djudjic had done an image search through Google, discovering that the photograph of her had been posted on the Samsung Malaysia website to promote the features of the Galaxy A8 Star. Looking at the photograph, Djudjic had noticed that a heavy retouching had been carried out: the irregularities of the skin had been reduced, the skin tone had been made clearer, the capillaries had been removed from the eyes and above all the background had been replaced with a autumnal image different from the original.
The photo was presented in such a way as to imply that with the new smartphone you could blur the background at will, highlighting the foreground subject more prominently, a function now common to many mobile phones on the market and rather requested by users.
It is not the first time that Samsung has been discovered to use images taken with professional cameras by making believe, more or less explicitly, that they were instead made with its smartphones. Something similar had already happened during the summer on the Samsung Brazil website.
Smartphone cameras continue to improve and actually sometimes deliver comparable results to DSLRs, but the difference in most cases continues to be noticeable. DSLRs are fitted with larger sensors and optics with higher quality lenses, far from the tiny ones used on the smartphones we carry in our pockets. However, the progressive approach of the characteristics sometimes induces companies to take advantage of them, with communication campaigns in which professionally shot images are used, passing them off as those of their smartphones. Also last August, a Huawei ad did something similar.
However, the case of Samsung and Djudjic's photography presents some more problems and exposes the smartphone manufacturer to more criticism. Djudjic's photograph had been sold as a stock image, i.e. as a generic photograph of a particular situation that can be used in multiple forms and contexts. It is unclear how a stock image can in any way illustrate the characteristics of a smartphone, especially its camera. On the Samsung Malaysia website under the retouched photograph the words “simulated image for demonstration purposes” are now visible in small format.
