Samsung, the world’s leading manufacturer of smartphones with a market share of around 20% in the last quarter, is constantly making good technology leaps. Camera resolution is now one of the basic criteria when buying a smartphone, and in recent years manufacturers have worked hard to ensure that smartphones are able to capture images of a quality similar to cameras used by professional photographers. In this way, some companies allow themselves to use these photos in their advertising.
Photographer Dunja Djudjic said in one of her articles that she discovered that Samsung had taken a picture of her with a DSLR to simulate the portrait mode of her phone’s camera. For those who don’t know, a DSLR is a digital SLR camera with a large digital sensor, with reflex visor and lens change. According to the photographer, Samsung would have received this photo on the photo platform called EyeEm. She claims to have added several of her photos to the platform, and when some of them were selected for sale, she was informed by email. Out of curiosity, she opted for an inverted image search a few days later and was surprised that there were few search results on the Galaxy A8 Star.
Following the first link to Samsung Malaysia’s website, she came across a picture of herself retouched on her face and hair. All the blood vessels in her eyes that had appeared on the original image were removed and the hair turned slightly red.
After this observation, the photographer says that she contacted the EyeEm platform to make sure Samsung had paid well for this image and was told that the sale had not yet been recorded on EyeEm. However, she was told that buyers sometimes have subscriptions to Getty Images (EyeEm partner), which means they will be charged for their photos later. The photos can be used for months before the platform receives sales data. She also said she tried to contact Samsung in vain, but the company only replied with a series of general messages that taught her to use Samsung smartphones.
This isn’t the first time a smartphone manufacturer has been caught exchanging a photo taken with a digital snapshot in an advertisement for its phone’s photo capabilities, and this is proving misleading, giving potential buyers a false idea of what a product is capable of. It is therefore important to urge all consumers to be vigilant to avoid manipulation.
Related posts:
Leave a Reply