The 2019 trend when it came to smartphone photography was pop-up cameras for phone makers to give the illusion of a full-display without any notch like on the iPhones or punch hole like on the latest Galaxy phones. Lets take an example of the OnePlus 7 Pro that was ranked by some pundits and awarded the best value Android phone in 2019, despite it costing over UGX 360k ($100 )more than what one would pay for a ZTE Axon 10 Pro, with the OnePlus base model having less RAM, half the flash memory, and somewhat weaker cameras.
It pretty clear that the allure was this pop-up front camera, rather than the tiny teardrop notch! We have lost the pop-up camera. Very few other pop-up cameras have made it this side of the Sahara as an official product release, and 2020 is pretty early, so it’s hard to say if this is actually a trend.
What could be the issue? Well, so far, no pop-up or flip-over camera phone (like the Zenphone 6) has been announced. It should be noted that the pop-up camera prevents smartphone makers from put in high-end feature like water and durst resistance also known as IP rating. But then again, IP ratings are often not given for lower priced phones. That’s kind of a premium thing.
No 2020 pop-up camera, punch holes wins
Maybe someone’s decided that the “punch hole” says 2020? Or maybe they have had too many warranty claims on busted pop-ups? Huawei’s latest P40 Pro, Xiaomi’s Poco X2, OnePlus 8 Pro, Samsung Galaxy s20 series, Oppo Find X2 Pro all have punch holes in favor of pop-up cameras.
There could be a number of reasons specific to OpenPlus. However, at the other BBK Electronics companies, pop-ups seem to be safe so far in 2020. OPPO has a number of phones with pop-ups, and so does Vivo. But we have only seen late model 2019 phones to date for most companies. Though an interesting patent suggests we might see an OPPO phone in 2020 with a side-pop out camera and it could just be better tech.
The future of completely eliminating the pop-up cameras will be an under-display camera, just as the current fingerprint sensors embedded in screens. Several companies will have their own implementation of the under-display selfie camera. A previous tweet from Xiaomi senior vice president Wang Xiang showed off a series of slides that explained more about how the feature actually works. The camera is embedded in the top of the device, as usual. But instead of putting a border around it (a notch) or cutting a hole in the screen (a hole-punch display), the camera is covered with a “special-low-reflective glass with high transmittance.”
This setup allows the area of the display to transform into a transparent surface in order to take pictures, and the transparent display then cleverly doubles as the camera lens on top. Compared to other notch-less solutions, like pop-up cameras or flipping cameras, there are no mechanically moving parts to worry about here. If this tech matures, we can see its huge adoption later in 2020 and beyond.
