When we watched the latest ad from Nokia showing off its PureView technology and ridiculously fluid optical image stabilisation, we were stunned. Excited. Happy. If the camera on the Lumia was that good, we wanted it. But it was faked. Nokia isn’t showing off what the Lumia 920 can do — that video was shot with a big DSLR.
Update: Nokia has taken to its blog to show us what OIS actually looks like on the Lumia 920.
Sure, companies jerk people around all the time: photoshop to create impossibly perfect models, excellent lighting to stage pristine conditions, makeup to cover zits, angles to mock thinness and so on and so on. It’s all a damn pony show to sell, sell, sell. Tricking people, be damned. And that’s fair, we get it. But there’s a difference between these expected marketing tricks of the trade and a bait and switch.
Nokia posted the video above on its official YouTube channel as an explicit demo of PureView technology — the same tech in the new Lumia 920. Generically cute guy and alternatively cute girl go out on a cute bike ride with Lumia in tow. He records. He uses his Lumia phone and its awesome PureView technology to capture a moment. And oh my god that optical image stabilisation is so good. Unbelievably so! That’s what Nokia wanted us to see.
But as Pocketnow discovered, this wasn’t actually recorded with PureView technology — it was capped from a pro DSLR. If you look closely, as the girl rides by a reflection, you can see a van complete with a man holding what looks like the biggest phone on the planet or a RED camera. It’s a camera crew faking technology to trick its consumers. It’s cheating. Look at it.
Here’s what Nokia told us when we asked for comment:
“To be fair, the video was a demonstration of optical image stabilisation, not PureView”
-Doug Dawson, Vice President of Media Relations, Nokia
Why would Nokia want to demo the stabilisation prowess of some other company’s camera? As you can see on Nokia’s YouTube page, the video has the word PureView all over it, a clear attempt to impress us with PureView by using something that isn’t PureView. That’s not dubious marketing, it’s just downright deceiving. The company cops to faking the video in an obscure corporate blog post most people won’t read, which, sure, is kind of commendable. But the actually honest thing to do would be a little “some images simulated” disclaimer or any other number of ways to post this video without being so cavalier with the truth.