Mobile phones reduced their bezels to bring the screen as close to the sides as possible and maximize viewing space, but that caused some components to run out of space. Such as the front screens, which in some cases were anchored to the ‘notch’ with different shapes, and in other cases they ended up embedded in holes in the screen itself.
However, several brands have been devising how to hide the front camera behind the screen itself and ZTE has been the first to put a mobile in circulation with this technology. The ZTE Axon 20 5G, the world’s first under-screen camera phone, and now youtuber JerryRigEverything has inspected it to show us how the system works. And yes, it seems to have a trick.
Two screens instead of one
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Placing the camera behind the screen has a fundamental problem, and that problem is none other than finding a way for the light to pass through the screen to be able to send it to the sensor and, ultimately, produce the photograph. That is why several brands have played with OLED panel-based designs, capable of partially turning off and with a design that can “see through” to let in light.
As evidenced by the tests carried out by JerryRigEverything, ZTE uses a double screen for the front of its phone, although the existence of the second is difficult to detect unless we look for it expressly. Thus, the front camera is not hidden behind the front screen but behind a small free-standing square screen that hides the lens, and that apparently has less resolution than the rest of the panel.
Thanks to this system, ZTE can more precisely manage the shutdown of this small screen to let light through to the sensor when we use the camera for selfies, while mounting it with a lower resolution has larger pixels and therefore fewer “edges” to interfere with light reception. In fact, when JerryRigEverything slides the notification screen, it can be seen that the screen that covers the camera not only has a lower resolution but also changes the tint, differing from the main screen.
The photographs taken with the hidden front camera of the ZTE Axon 20 5G are not perfect and it shows that the phone is the first generation of the models that will come later and must improve the technology. However, seems like a great first step to hide the front cameras of the phones forever and offer clean devices, in the same way that the fingerprint sensors were also hidden behind the panels. OLED screens, of course, because we are talking about optical devices. Like cameras.
was originally published in
Xataka Android
by
Samuel Fernandez
.
