Smartphone makers have been toiling with the idea of having a fully bezeless smartphone. What you’re looking at in the tweet below could well be the world’s first under-display camera. The video was posted to Oppo’s official Twitter account without much detail. What we can see, though, is a working front-facing camera that doesn’t need a notch, tear drop, hole punch, or pop-up sliding mechanism to leave that edge-to-edge display uninterrupted.
Oppo has been on the fore-front of innovation and started with in-display fingerprint sensors, pop-up selfie cameras and today have shown off a smartphone with under-display camera.
Quality of the under-display camera
Engadget reports that the video was first posted to Weibo by Oppo VP Brian Shen. ”At this stage, it’s difficult for under-display cameras to match the same results as normal cameras, there’s bound to be some loss in optical quality,” wrote Shen. “But, no new technology jumps to perfection right away.”
Oppo has made a name for itself with innovations like super-fast VOOC charging and periscope zoom lenses that eventually made their way into shipping products. There’s no telling when we’ll see the first smartphone with one of these invisible under-display cameras.
We might just be looking at a concept or prototype that is months away from a phone that will be put in production. We now have hope that smartphone makers have invested research and development money to innovate the next best thing. The war on bezeless phones is here, but now that we see a prototype, how long could it be till we see them in production?