Nokia admits it needlessly faked PureView still photos  

The linked story, written by me, has been an exercise in frustration to maintain. As soon as we ran it, commenters began telling us to “do our research” and that “we were wrong” and “don’t know anything” yet, as a photographer myself (and having done quite a bit of research before publishing), I was confident these stills weren’t real, or at least had been modified in some way.

A few hours after I actually reached out for comment from Nokia, and directly asked “are the still photos in the video also ‘simulated’ and not produced on a Lumia device” and got the response:

“Contrary to information posted on some blogger and technology websites, all still images found on the PureView page on Nokia.com were taken using a Nokia Lumia 920 prototype phone. They were not faked.

Regarding the video we released, as we said in our apology we should have posted a disclaimer stating the entire video – including all three sequences – was a representation of optical image stabilization (OIS) only. A disclaimer stating that the video was not shot using a Nokia Lumia 920 is now clearly shown under the video. The images shown at the top of Youssef Sarhan’s blog seem to be screen grabs from the same video – something he says himself: This is a still from Nokia’s new product promo video.”

For Nokia to claim that these “screen grabs” don’t equate to being “photos” since they are screenshots from the video is bullshit. Oh, then they responded to The Verge too:

For clarification, the first photo was shot by a bystander in Helsinki and apparently posted by them to the Internet. It shows the production set-up being used for the video for which we have apologized for not being transparent. Indeed, a Lumia 920 was not used to illustrate the benefits of optical image stabilization and we regret the error. The other still images in this post were extracted from that video. Again, we have posted an apology and the video is now clearly marked. We also posted images of the Lumia 920 being used in low light conditions yesterday. These images were taken in Central Park, the evening prior to our launch in New York, using a Lumia 920 prototype and no artificial lighting or stands, and a flagship smartphone from another manufacturer. Their authenticity is not in question. The same is true for the PureView photos on Nokia’s product pages.

I still don’t understand why the company felt the need to actually even bother do this, if they’re so confident in how great the technology works. It’s fishy, and unnecessary.

It’s made me wonder if the technology is as great as they’re claiming it to be, and I’m very, very skeptical of the camera being nothing more than marketing fluff. There’s a few ‘real world’ demos out there, but they’ve all been in controlled situations organized by Nokia.

The story is now making its way around the web, hopefully Nokia doesn’t make the same mistake again. This certainly puts a shadow over their ‘amazing’ launch.