Xiaomi’s “third-generation” under-display camera looks almost invisible

Front-facing cameras have been the bane of smartphone design in recent years. As screens get bigger and bigger and edges get smaller and smaller, there is nowhere to put a front camera that does not interfere with the display. Manufacturers have mostly opted for clumsy solutions that make the display as large as possible and simply cut out all the chunks you need to support the front camera. This started out as a cut-out cut, and companies have been working lately until one circle looks like someone has taken a hole punch tool to the display.

The holy grail of camera design at the front is the camera for under-display. Why worry about the placement of the camera when you can just slide it behind the display? Manufacturers have been pushing this idea in public since at least last year, with Xiaomi leading the charge. Today, the company is back with video footage of what it calls its “third-generation” state-of-the-art camera technology, though generations one and two never came on the market.

Assuming that this is very beneficial promotional material, Xaiomi’s new camera looks almost invisible in it, but only one shot of the video. In the worst recording we have recorded above, the display looks darker than normal above the camera. A camera during playback must see through the spaces between the pixels, and this means that the playback becomes a bit thinner. Xiaomi’s graph shows that early prototypes remove 75 percent of the pixels above the camera, but the latest “third-generation” technology maintains the full display resolution and uses smaller pixels above the camera, and in principle simply increases the dot increase.

Even if Xiaomi is overbearing things and the camera section of the display seems a bit strange, the alternative here is full and total blackness. The camera area under the view is the same size as a camera exclusion, and in that case I think a few funny external pixels are a better alternative than no pixels at all. The real question to which we are not answering is “how will this affect the quality of the selfie camera?” since placing pixels in front of a camera may not be good for image quality. Manufacturers will probably have to choose between a high quality selfie camera or a more seamless display.

One thing that makes no sense about the video and graphics of Xiaomi is that the video shows a square camera clip, while the graphics show a much nicer-looking round clip. Perhaps smartphone leaker Ice Universe has pictures of a Xiaomi prototype with a round cut, and it looks great. Ice says the display comes from China Star Optoelectronics Technology (CSOT), a division of TCL.

Nowadays, there are actually quite a few optical components that live under a smartphone display. For years, phones have been packaged in optical fingerprint sensors under-display, which, like a camera, are CMOS sensors that see through the display pixels. Reading your fingerprint is a lot easier than making a high quality photo, because the image quality only needs to be good enough to resolve your fingerprint. We also regularly see sensors for illumination and proximity from close display (most recently in Pixel 4a) further reducing the need for a top edge.

Xiaomi says it “intends to bring this technology to the mass market next year.” Xiaomi’s full announcement is really designed to avoid ZTE, which already claims the title “world’s first under-display camera smartphone” for the ZTE Axon 20 5G, a phone that will be announced next week.