Looks like xiaomi is adding some pressure on the low end market, where people are a little more feature conscious.
The p20 lite was brilliant my mother owns one and for what it cost it’s a great little device, but the tech content pales compared to the last xiaomi round
I think the low end pressure is applying to xiaomi as well, from Oppo, Ding-Ding, etc...it's really hard to keep up with the cheap phone providers these days!
I think that the over clocking cheat is a bit different if they are honest about and say the phone, when overclocked, are actually capable of this. The DSLR image is not possible in any case.
Unless the goal of cheating the benchmark was to target user's who overclock their phones (honestly, who does this?, like %0.0001?), then I would still call it dishonest.
Shouldn't benchmarks reflect what your delivering to consumers?
Honest related question. Do car manufacturers do this with their car's speed tests? I know you can squeeze another 50+ HP out of a VW Golf for example with a chip and a higher octane fuel, but AFAICT the specs you see on their site and at the dealer don't show this extra HP. (I realize VW is a bad example of a company that doesn't cheat their books!).
While I'd be absolutely certain they both spy on me (for various degrees of "spying"), I trust Google to better safeguard the data it collects about me.
Huawei is more likely to do a poor job of keeping said data to itself, either intentionally (selling it outright) or by getting hacked.
I'm convinced Google wouldn't sell my data - it is immensely more valuable to them if they're the only ones with it. That said, they'd still use it - to target and profile me, and of course I expect them both to share it with the respective governments.
Moreover, if I use Google services through a Huawei phone, they both end up with my data, while if I use a google device at least it's just Google. I'm not enthusiastic about either, but, hey, lesser of two evils.
(For the record I have an iPhone and try to avoid giving Google too much data about me)
Jeez, you'd think the Red Scare would be a thing of the past, but no, apparently a phone maker wants to eradicate your way of life by selling you phones.
At this point you really have to conclude that the intense anti-China bigotry here on HN is a deliberate strategy. Hate is who people like scooke are and HN makes every effort to spread and amplify that hate.
Please don't post nationalistic flamewar comments to HN, or project the enemy of your view onto the whole of this community. People are simply divided—and they're biting each other's heads off, which is not cool and needs to stop.
What I find remarkable is how one comment accuses a Chinese company of trying to "destroy" a "way of life" and there is absolutely no consequence, the comment is in no way highlighted as unusual or unwelcome. I know a lot of people who work at Huawei. They are some of the most boring and kind people on the planet. The idea that they are trying to destroy anything is laughable.
But my comment which merely highlights the absurdity of the previous comment is immediately flagged.
> there is absolutely no consequence, the comment is in no way highlighted as unusual or unwelcome.
It's flagged and dead, unlike your comment, which is merely flagged. You're replying to a comment dang wrote after https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17808124 What else would you like to happen?
Someone made the same comment to me the other day.
I said "Either it's the Americans or the Chinese spying on my, either way I'm fucked". I feel like it's safe to assume that most consumer hardware is backdoored/cracked by one intelligence agency or another.
Do we have proof that's the case with Apple though? Not a fanboy, but I casually remember reading that they weren't willing to sacrifice their security and capitulate to the gov on this point.
will after installing Lineage it's relatively safe, but you are too late to party after bootloader unlock page gone, now it's up to finding friendly customer service representative or giving try to DC unlocker which sometimes work even on phones they officially don't support
There's a million reasons. "Pretend to take a selfie so we can check the lighting." "Let's try a few different poses so the director has some options to choose from for the layout." "Let me take one with my other camera for a wardrobe reference."
Have you never made up a dummy report in HTML just so the designer could check the colors and layout? Do you refuse to work on any prototype that doesn't use live data?
I once saw a Microsoft Cloud poster in a train station that did claim they were curing cancer. I'd rather be the Huawei model than the designer of that poster.
Because they are some of the lowest paid workers in the project. Why should they risk their precarious jobs when higher-paid, and more secure workers are also aware of the deception?
This is an outrage! Next you're going to tell me that the pictures of happy creatives and handsome businesspersons in every service or product website are not actual users who are just so damn happy that they can't stop smiling, but actors/models or even (gasp) stock photos!
Given that Apple set the standard by posting photos that are explicitly labeled as being shot on iPhone, it think it’s totally fine to expect an image with selfie-arm extending into the frame to have actually been shot on the device.
> Photos from Apple's "Shot on iPhone" ads are indeed taken with iPhones, albeit with additional equipment like special lenses attached to the phone, and they've been touched up with professional photo editing software.
Yeah, shot using an iPhone. Using the iPhone’s minuscule sized image sensor, through its tiny lens, and built in image processoring engine. With an attached lens.
Huawei used a large image sensor DSLR with dedicated processing chips and lenses designed for the body. The product they’re trying to pass off as having produced the image needed have been within 29 square miles.
> Everything was fine until people took a closer look at the behind-the-scenes photos (which have since been deleted) from the ad shoot posted by Elshamy to her Instagram account.
I doubt it's an accident. It's probably just a PR stunt by huawei, otherwise not many people would even talk about this phone. Unless whoever is runnigng that actress's instagram account is incredibly stupid to not notice that clearly controversial photo: [https://petapixel.com/assets/uploads/2018/08/bts0.jpg]
Or alternatively the controversy increases Elshamy's profile. Given that the account is either controlled by her, or her agent, I'd say that's the more likely explanation.
I might sound jaded, but: isn't this happening constantly anyway? Usually with just a small bit of "fig-leaf" credibility (like the aforementioned "shot on iPhone" pieces, but especially supertiny illegible disclaimers) - but the effect is the same.
fakes aside, my wife bought this phone (the pro) and I have to say it has the best camera (+post processing) I've seen on a phone. My wife sucks at taking photos but with that thing they look kinda nice. Their 3 lens composite photo system seems like it actually, really helps. And their added post processing of "portrait" mode gives a nice instagramish look, It's too much for my tastes (I don't do instagram soo....) but it's interesting it does some depth-of-field stuff too (probably with the help of the 3 lenses)
The only downside is I hate the $850 price tag (I refuse to pay more than $200 on a phone...) it'll be interesting when this sort of tech trickles down in the next few years.
Food commercials are purely aesthetic. They are not really attesting to that the food you get will look or taste good. Logically, how could they? That being said, it's apparently a myth that food commercials don't use real food. But does it matter, given that your Whopper won't look exactly like the one in the ad regardless?
It is a lot different if you outright claim your smartphone took photos it did not. That is more like saying that your new car can get 35 MPG when it couldn't under any circumstances.
People would probably find it a lot easier to be outraged if Apple faked an iPhone camera shot, which probably says more about people than it does about companies.
> Photos from Apple's "Shot on iPhone" ads are indeed taken with iPhones, albeit with additional equipment like special lenses attached to the phone, and they've been touched up with professional photo editing software... A tiny, fine-print disclosure about lenses and retouches appears on the Apple ads...
Interesting. In fairness, the quality of modern smartphone cameras makes this not so surprising to me. I think it might become normal to throw a smartphone photo into Lightroom in the future, even if it's probably overkill today.
Now I wonder if the same caveat applies to the Pixel photos that are used in advertising.
Mounting an SLR lens to an iPhone sensor would produce worse results than using the default lens. The imaging sensors used in cell phones are much smaller than SLRs, so you'd need to get a much wider angle lens. Then, you'd only be using the center of the lens, which the sensor would outresolve anyway.
I have heard the rule is that if it's the food you're selling, it has to be real. But if you have some extra stuff in there (suppose you're selling a topping or something like that), that stuff can be fake food because it's not the food being advertised.
One story that I read somewhere involved opening 50 frozen dinners and picking the 20 or so very best peas for the photographs. Technically each pea came from the actual product! So they seem to go to some lengths to obey the rules, even if it involves some bending.
>Food commercials are purely aesthetic. They are not really attesting to that the food you get will look or taste good. Logically, how could they? That being said, it's apparently a myth that food commercials don't use real food. But does it matter, given that your Whopper won't look exactly like the one in the ad regardless?
supposedly they have to use the same ingredients that make up the food. yes, they can still use all sorts of camera tricks and practical effects to get it look better than it is, but at least it puts an upper bound of how much bullshitry they can create.
When a relative entered into the advertising business out of college she would tell me all about the tricks they did to make foods look good in the photo shoots.
The burgers had toothpicks inside to make everything stand taller, grapes and other fruits were dipped in oil...
The sensor and lens of phones are good enough today to look exactly like the picture in the video (besides the shallow DoF that is only possible with large lenses). The quality is primarily in the skill of lighting the room (in this case with $1000 of softboxes), and secondarily how the image is developed from RAW and retouched.
I completely agree with you with regard to professional cameras and real DoF vs synthetic DoF that some of the nicer phones are doing these days.... but it sounds like you don't view using a DSLR here as misrepresenting the product in the advertisement?
If we have to have "*enlarged to show texture" on cereal boxes so that people know they aren't buying a box full of 6"-wide Wheaties or say "professional driver on a closed course" when that new Audi on the TV does a 360 on the salt flat, surely there would be some expectation that there would be a disclaimer that the photo of the actor who was pretending to take a selfie with this hot new phone wasn't actually using the product being promoted?
>it sounds like you don't view using a DSLR here as misrepresenting the product in the advertisement?
Not really. I'm saying that it's already largely misrepresented through 99% other factors. The use of the DSLR is such a small factor that no one should really care whether it is used or the phone camera.
This is terrible logic. You are acting as if the statement was the quality of the camera and if a similar enough picture could in theory have been taken it is almost true to the extent that if an identical image could have been taken it would magically transform into a truth. The actual statement was that particular image had been taken by that device which was 100% false. In fact it rarely makes sense to talk about degrees of truth people are either misleading you and nothing they have to say is worth anything or they are being truthful.
"Misrepresenting the product" means to fabricate a result that misleads potential customers to think that they will get a similar result when using the product. If (for the sake of argument) a DSLR and phone camera produced identical results, they would not be misrepresenting the product because customers will happily get the results they saw on TV. The implication or direct statement that the result is actually produced from the phone is a lie, but it's harmless to the customer. It is harmful if the result is vastly different than the normal circumstances of operating a phone camera because of lighting, photographer's skill, and hours of editing. What I am claiming is that DSLRs and phone cameras are in fact very identical, so this (in itself) is not misrepresenting the product.
I would pay extra for a smartphone that let me do aperture/shutter control so that I could get the DoF I wanted. People say there's no point in compact cameras anymore and that's mostly true as far as pointing and shooting, but I can still take more interesting photos with my 5-year-old compact that gives me those controls than I can on my phone, even if my phone has more megapixels.
The controls don't matter - you can't get shallow DoF on a camera with a lens/sensor the size of the one in your phone. This is why the new iPhones mock it in software.
Chances are, a smartphone isn't going to give you the DoF you want (except by "faking it" using post-processing). There's a direct relationship between aperture for a given focal length and the front diameter of the lens. With a tiny lens and a low f-number, you're going to have a small focal length and therefore a wide DoF.
Sure you can. For those images, start with properly placed lights. Then murder the images in your editor by increasing shadows beyond what is natural, and tune with the curve editor. What objective limitation does a phone camera have that would prevent you from doing that?
Agreed that would be the largest factor, besides DoF. Although, I've been surprised by iPhone 8 or greater noise levels. In the article's video, you wouldn't notice the noise at that resolution if taken with a modern iPhone. Also, the shadows are mainly in the background, so you could retouch it easily with additional manual blurring. For Huawei, I have no idea, but I assume it's not much worse.
I don't have a phone capable of RAW images, but it's not a focus of the camera's design for those that have it, unlike professional cameras, so the bit depth will be low and it will expose the high ISO noise before "smart" denoising is applied when taking JPEG.
DoF has little to do with how big the lens is (unless that’s your way to say large aperture, but you can have 1.8 with small lenses too). But it has some to do with how large the sensor is.
It should be clear that DOF has everything to do with the physical size of the lens because aperture for a given focal length defines the front element diameter. Your example very small f1.8 lens has to have a very small focal length and therefore deep DOF.
Did you miss the part where I introduced F-number into discussion instead of the lens size?
What do you think will happen to DoF when I take my huge 70-200 and close it down to 22?
F-number describes the aperture diameter, it has no way to affect anything. The same as meters do not affect the distance.
However, when you close the aperture on the large lens, the lens still stays large.
That was exactly my point: it is about aperture, not the lens size.
I get what you say about physically larger lenses having larger apertures in absolute dimensions, not the ratio, however that does not help smartphones, because of the distance of the focal plane and the sensor size. And this where the limiting factor is.
This discussion is about shallow DoF. You cannot have shallow DoF with a lens with a small aperture diameter. Both the aperture diameter and sensor must be large.
With everything else constant (f-number, sensor size, magnification, etc), increasing the aperture diameter will increase the circle of confusion and therefore decrease the depth of field.
So what? Camera companies, television companies, have been using simulated images in advertisements since forever. It's an ad. Of course it's fake. What world are you living in?
Since the dawn of time advertisers have over-exaggerated and over-sold products. Call it an art (I might, but not in this case), call it a sham. It is what it is. No surprises here.
https://www.phonearena.com/news/Huawei-Ascend-P7-found-to-be...
https://www.anandtech.com/show/8403/examining-huaweis-benchm...
Samsung and others also did it:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/7384/state-of-cheating-in-and...
I own the Ascend P7, and my GF is also a Huawei user, and they're good devices. But they feel the need to cheat.