ZTE Launches World’s First Under-Screen Selfie Camera Phone

After testing its full-screen display technology for a while, Chinese mobile device maker ZTE officially launched the first business phone with an under-display front camera.

The Axon 20 5G avoids a hole-punch or notch solution for its 32-megapixel selfie camera and instead hides it under its 6.9-inch 90 Hz OLED screen, which is surrounded by minimal bezels at all four sides.

According to ZTE, the area around the camera looks just as bright and vivid as the rest of the screen. The company says it has accomplished this by using a high-transparency material that features both organic and inorganic films.

Putting a camera under the screen makes it harder to match the quality of an unobstructed smartphone camera, so to compensate, ZTE has developed software algorithms that address haze, glare, and color cast issues in the pictures.

The company also touched on the “color sync” between the camera and the screen, which sounds like it captures images between the screen’s PWM flicker. (PWM flickering is a way to control screen brightness by adding a few breaks without light emittance.)

The phone also features an under-display fingerprint sensor and an under-display speaker system. Elsewhere at the rear is a 64-megapixel camera backed by an 8-megapixel ultra-wide lens with 2-megapixel macro and depth sensors.

The Axon 20 5G will be available to order in China starting September 10 at a cost of around $ 320, but it is unclear if it will be available internationally.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a Chinese company come up with a fix for the ubiquitous notch on the smartphone screen. Oppo showed off its own under-screen camera prototype in June 2019, but the technology has yet to appear on a consumer Oppo phone.

Apple is believed to be working towards a notchless iPhone design. The notch has been a controversial design decision since it debuted on the ‌‌iPhone‌‌ X in 2017, and it has always felt like a stopgap on the way to an ‌‌iPhone‌‌ with a truly edge-to-edge display, but when it will appear is unknown.

Apple’s 2020 ‌iPhone‌ lineup is expected to include an improved triple rear camera system, with at least one high-end model featuring an additional LiDAR camera for 3D mapping. The display notch, which houses Apple’s TrueDepth camera and Face ID technology, is almost certain to stick, though there have been conflicting rumors as to whether the notch will be smaller or the same size as on previous models.