It’s the Galaxy A8 fiasco all over again. In August, Samsung was caught passing off DSLR images as that of the Galaxy A8 and now, the company has done it again with the Galaxy A8 Star. The Hong Kong landing page of Samsung’s Galaxy A8 Star smartphone shows a set of two images which, as per Samsung, have been clicked using the Galaxy A8 Star’s Live Focus and Portrait mode features. Little did Samsung think before pulling off this marketing ruse. The company was busted by none other than the photographer of the image who used a DSLR camera to click it.
Photographer Dunja Djudjic’s DSLR image was uploaded by her on EyeEm, a global photography community. It was then picked up by Getty images as a stock photograph to be sold through its platform. After discovering that her picture had been sold, which interestingly features Djudjic herself, she performed a reverse image search on Google to figure out where the image was being used. “I thought that, even if I get to see the image online, it could be included in a blog post about outdoor activities, nature, autumn,” the photographer noted. To her surprise, the results of the reverse image search coughed up the Galaxy A8 Star product page, claiming the same was taken using the smartphone.
“My first reaction was to burst out into laughter. Just look at the Photoshop job they did on my face and hair! I’ve always liked my natural hair color, but I guess the creator of this franken-image prefers reddish tones. Except in the eyes though, where they removed all of the blood vessels,” Djudjic notes in an article she posted about the forgery on her website.
Djudjic tried contacting Samsung and Getty images to take up the issue, but couldn’t get through either company for a fix. Nevertheless, this serves as yet another example of how tech companies cheat customers when it comes to the photography capabilities of their smartphones. Samsung has now been caught doing this several times. Back in August, Huawei was also caught passing off a DSLR images as as camera samples for the Nova 3 smartphone.