Huawei is set to launch its new flagship smartphone for 2019 as a successor to its P20, the Huawei P30. There is high anticipation that the phone features a periscope camera that can magnify up to 5X with a hybrid zoom.

Well, the company’s CEO, Richard Yu, published a teaser of the P30’s camera abilities, in anticipation of the handset’s launch. The photographs are beautiful, but there’s also something strange about them. This entire teaser looks like a lie. These images were not shot from the P30.

On the right, Jack Olson.
On the right, Jack Olson.

The photograph of the child in the yellow raincoat with the ducks was taken from Photographer Jake Olson’s portfolio.

This isn’t new for Huawei. They’ve become so used to this kind of behavior that they didn’t stop even when they got called out for passing off DSLR photographs as selfie photographs in their Nova 3 campaign, last year. For the Nova 3,  at least they had organized a photoshoot and hired a professional photographer to create their own images. This year, the company resorted to assembling stock images for their teaser.

On the right, Tom Pfeifer.

The image of the volcanic eruption is from 2009. It was shot by the photographer Tom Pfeifer, for Volcano Discovery. The image is also available on Getty Images.

This doesn’t look very good for Huawei, even though they did post a disclaimer on the poster, albeit after being publicly called out. If the company had a little more faith in their camera’s capabilities, maybe we would too.

Thoughts?