Nokia admits faking smartphone ad
Nokia has this week displayed a dramatic video of a video stabilization feature in its forthcoming Lumia 920 smartphone. Unfortunately it’s now been forced to admit the footage was actually shot with a full-blown video camera.
The feature, PureView, is designed to use some bad-ass mathematics to compensate for the effects of shakes when a human holds a cameraphone, particularly when moving.
To illustrate the effects the company produced a clever video of an attractive couple out on a cycling trip and then riding a carousel before enjoying an evening in a city center. The footage shows the man using a cameraphone to film the woman, then cuts to splitscreen footage of what he’s filming: one side showing the footage without PureView activated and one with it switched on. The commercial ends with a comparison of still shots, again with and without the feature.
Unfortunately an eagle-eyed reporter at The Verge noticed something amiss. A trailer in the background of the supposed smartphone footage shows a reflection of who is actually filming the cycling woman. It’s not only a completely different man, but he’s completely stationary and is using a video camera.
Nokia has since apologized and said the video was purely designed as a representation of the effects. It admits it should have included a disclaimer to this effect and made clear the footage wasn’t shot on a Lumia 920. The company has now added the disclaimed to the YouTube listing as well as a caption on the video itself.
The company has also published a video that was shown at the press conference launching the phone. This video shows genuine footage of the Lumia 920 with the PureView switched on and compares it to footage of the same scene taken with a “competitor smartphone.”
The effect is certainly visible, though we don’t know how crappy the rival phone was. A fair comparison would be to a predecessor such as the Lumia 900 that doesn’t have the feature, though it’s perhaps understandable Nokia doesn’t want its own devices shown as having limitations.
September 8th, 2012
“we don’t know how crappy the rival phone was.”
The rival phone was Samsung’s S3.