The race for the “pure screen” that runs in the mobile industry is preparing to welcome new participants: the cell phones with invisible front camera. Specifically, it is about smartphones where the front photo sensor is located below the display, promoting a cleaner design, without interruptions in the glass.
In recent months we have seen prototypes that showed this characteristic and, now, the 2020 calendar already has the date set for the appearance of the first phone with embedded in-screen camera, as we will review later.
This technology will open the way to a new design language or, rather, it will extend the philosophy that has already started in the mobile business, the aforementioned search for the screen to occupy more and more space in front of the devices. In this journey there are some elements that the manufacturers were gradually eliminating, with different ideas.
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On the one hand, cell phones have fewer and fewer frames. Thus, the display it stretches to the sides and ends of the equipment, offering a much more refined aesthetic and a ratio (the relationship between the screen and the size of the device) in favor of the former. On the other hand, in smartphones more modern the physical buttons have disappeared in front.
Another “victim” of the desire for the pure screen is the fingerprint reader, another component that usually appeared in front of phones. What were the strategies, in this case? Some manufacturers took it to the back and a few to the side, positions that many users found uncomfortable. Everything is to gain space on the screen! Certain brands even preferred to eliminate the biometric sensor.
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But as we count on this note from TN Tecno, the fingerprint reader also began to be located under the glass, managing to stay in the devices without stealing millimeters from the screen. As we noted, that same gadget will now begin to be applied in cameras for selfies.
The tour of the front cameras
When phones had large bezels, the front camera had a comfortable space. As they disappeared, smartphone designers had to come up with solutions:where to place the camera before the unbridled advance of the glass, which is increasingly stretched towards the extremes?
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Some ideas came up, which we saw on many phones. The main one: the famous “notch”. It is a notch in which the selfie camera is located, which does not go from one side to the other but only cuts out a portion of the display. There are different shapes, the most common being the one that looks like a drop.
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We also saw crazier ideas, such as sliding and retractable cameras. The former place the camera in a sector that, precisely, slides and hides behind the body of the phone when the photographic component is not in use. The second are a kind of periscope (they call them “pop-up”) that emerges when the user wants to take a selfie. In both cases, a solution is offered so as not to “steal” space from the screen, although these are mechanisms that can present failures and breaks.
The next step: the invisible cameras
In a similar way to what happens with some fingerprint readers, the idea with the front camera is to hide it under the screen. As we anticipated, some ideas have already been shown in the sector and now a Chinese brand has announced that it will present the first commercial model with that design.
Is about ZTE, which on September 1 will show the world the cell phone Axion 20 5G which stands out for being the first to have the front camera embedded in the display. Rumors in the preview suggest that it will be 32 megapixels.
“It will be the world’s first mass-produced 5G phone with an under-screen camera, marking another milestone in exploring the true full-screen model,” the company said in a statement. As we see in the following tweet, they add an image that shows that really clean design.
Before, another Chinese brand, Oppo, had shown a conceptual model with the same idea in 2019, as you can see below.
If that design philosophy is consolidated, we will gradually say goodbye to the notch of the smartphones, inaugurating a new era in aesthetic terms within this business. For this, it will be necessary for other manufacturers to adopt it and, in addition, that the technology not only satisfies visually but also in its performance. That is to say, that being hidden behind glass offers the same results in photographs as the front cameras known up to now.
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