Does your smartphone have a notch, a punch hole or even a pop-up camera? Selfie cameras are one of the most divisive elements of modern smartphones, and it could be that one day they will be dropped with the launch of selfie shooters that are not shown.
The ZTE Axon 20 5G is the first commercially available smartphone with a selfie camera that is not shown, and we can confirm that it works.
We’ve been using the ZTE Axon 20 5G for a few weeks now and the selfie camera works well, but it’s not without problems. Below we show some selfie shots you can take and talk us through our first impression of the camera itself.
For more information on the phone in general, you can read our ZTE Axon 20 5G review. Here we talk about what happened to the selfie camera and how it is possible.
How does a selfie camera work under display?
This is not something that ZTE has revealed itself, but an informative breakdown video from JerryRig All you can see below gives us a little glimpse of how ZTE made it possible.
In essence, the company used two exhibits here. However, you will not notice that there are two screens.
There’s the standard 6.92-inch OLED panel that works like a normal smartphone screen, and then there’s a smaller square screen that sits on top of the selfie camera itself to let the shooter see through.
There’s probably more than that, but that’s the best information we have until ZTE explains the details. This is likely to be the way companies use this technology on future phones, which we expect to have selfie cameras displayed below.
For example, we have seen patents from Samsung that indicate that he is experimenting with similar technology. This may mean we see it on future phones from the company, such as the Galaxy Note 21 or Galaxy Z Fold 3.
What do the selfies look like?
What do selfies look like on the ZTE Axon 20 5G? This is fine, but the camera quality is not phenomenal. This phone uses a 32MP front-facing camera with an nf / 2.0 aperture.
Overall, the Axon 20 5G camera takes soft photos that have poor colors at best but can blow out at worst. We found that when most cell phone cameras perform well with good lighting, this camera felt blurry at best.
In dark conditions we found that the selfie camera of Axon 20 5G lost details and could not compete with most other smartphones with similar specifications on their front cover.
Overall, it’s not great and it’s partly due to the fact that it’s covered with a screen on top of the selfie camera. That said, this is the first implementation of this technology, so we hope it will improve on future smartphones.
Will it ever replace the notch?
No one knows for sure if under-screen selfie cameras will become the norm, but we expect the technology to appear on more smartphones by 2021.
It will probably be an alternative to the standalone cameras with notches and holes in the coming years, but there is no guarantee that it will completely wipe out the technology of other manufacturers.
This is especially true because the selfie camera under the screen on ZTE’s phone is not seamless. You can see the selfie camera if you are using the smartphone, and it is not useful if the purpose of the technology is to hide the camera.
This is probably something we will see improved in the future, but at the moment it does not hide well under the phone’s screen, especially if you use the part of the screen.
However, this is a big step for the technology that is not on display, available on a phone you can buy, and we hope to see major improvements to this technology in the coming months and years.