Here's why that Huawei photo could never come from a smartphone camera

Huawei, the Chinese smartphone company, got caught Monday using a photo taken with at least $4,500 worth of DSLR equipment to promote the camera in its Huawei P9 smartphone. (They've since taken down the post.)

Here's the deal: The P9 is a pretty good Android smartphone. In general, it falls somewhere in the middle of the quality pack in terms of flagships.

The device's one standout feature is its Leica-branded dual-camera system. It's not the best smartphone camera in the world, falling well short of industry leaders like the Samsung Galaxy S7 and iPhone 6s Plus.

But Huawei has touted the phone's image quality anyway. And the dual cameras do imbue this device one superpower: It can sense depth and blur backgrounds of nearby objects to give the illusion of a DSLR's lens. On Huawei's site the company calls this "professional camera like photo quality."

However, that's a very different thing from shooting images of the kind that actually come from professional cameras. Here are all the ways you can tell Huawei's ad photo didn't come from a smartphone.