Nokia caught faking Lumia 920 camera ad, issues apology
The euphoria at Nokia, as it unveiled two new phones with lots of exciting technology, evaporated quickly Wednesday when the company said that images in an ad for one of the phones were faked.
The whole thing started with Nokia announcing the Lumia 920, its new flagship phone with a camera technology called PureView. That technology is supposed to let customers shoot better pictures at night than they could with rival phones, as well as offer the capability to record stabilized video.
Nokia showcased both features in an ad, which you can see below, showing a man and a woman riding around on bikes with the man supposedly capturing the woman on video using the Lumia 920.
But what the Finnish phone company didn’t say was that the portions of the ad that look like they were shot with the Lumia 920 weren’t.
It wasn’t until The Verge put out an article Wednesday afternoon that Nokia confirmed that the PureView ad commercial had been shot with something other than a Lumia 920.
The Verge realized the ad was fake when it noticed a little something extra in the background of the Nokia ad. At around the 0:27 mark you see the woman in the ad pass by a trailer with a window, and in that window you can see the reflection for what appears to be a van with a camera that is definitely not the Lumia 920.
You can see this in the video The Verge put out below.
To Nokia’s credit, the company quickly confirmed that the ad was not shot with the Lumia 920, and put out an apology blog soon after.
“We should have posted a disclaimer stating this was a representation of OIS only,” the company said in the blog post. “This was not shot with a Lumia 920. At least, not yet. We apologize for the confusion we created.”
Nokia also updated the original blog for the ad to say the video is a simulation, and the company said it is looking to update the video to add a footnote as well.
The company also put out a new video, which you can see below, showing the real Lumia 920 stabilizing feature, which is good but far below the quality Nokia first showed us.
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