The race to launch the first full bezel-less and no notch smartphone is on and this race will soon become a thing of the past. Chinese companies like Oppo and Xiaomi are already working on transparent display cameras that hide the sensor beneath the screen. This completely obliterates the several kinds of notches or punch hole designs we’ve been accustomed to on smartphones. But, how does an under-display selfie camera on a smartphone actually work? Lets find out.
Several companies will have their own implementation of the under-display selfie camera and Xiaomi senior vice president Wang Xiang tweeted 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.”
Xiaomi says the 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.
Xiaomi's Under-Display Camera Technology could be the ultimate solution for a Full Screen Display coexisting with a front camera! RT if you love it. #InnovationForEveryone pic.twitter.com/8e7EdEBn8J
— Wang Xiang (@XiangW_) June 3, 2019
If they don’t make the camera (and, therefore, the inevitable notch) as small as possible, the transparent display system allows for a larger sensor and better image quality than its existing teardrop notches.
Under-display selfie camera imperfections
Not all is rosy for this under-display selfie camera technology, as Xiaomi notes in the slides, that you can still see a faint outline of the camera lens underneath the active display, but it’s at least a useable area of the screen instead of one that’s obscured entirely by a monolithic notch on top. Compared to other notch-less solutions, like pop-up lenses or flipping cameras, there are no mechanically moving parts to worry about here.
So far, what we are sure about is that the upcoming phone actually uses the new camera. All Xiaomi is saying for now is that it’s “currently exploring the possibility.” But companies like these love to experiment on new smartphone technologies that push new form factors and we hope the wait will not be long before one of them launches that bezel-less smartphone with no moving parts, holes or notch.
