We have a serious love affair with front cameras on our phones. Sure everyone likes to take selfies and their popularity has helped drive more social media sites into the stratosphere. But the cameras themselves are just so cumbersome to pick up precious phone real estate and increasingly steal space from the screen itself. A new solution involves hiding the front facet under the screen, as we see on the brand new ZTE Axon 20 5G. Now Zack from JerryRigEverything is putting this model to the test, seeing how it stops abuses and also giving us a better look at how this weird camera works.
Honestly, the durability test is not really the interesting part of this video, and we’re mostly just interested in checking the camera’s technology under the screen. Understandably, it is a bit visible under a number of conditions, but perhaps not distracting.
Close-ups show that the area above the camera is less pixel-dense than the surrounding screen, and when fully lit, you can just find the holes that allow light to pass. Animations moving across this area sometimes look a bit strained, which may be a consequence of aliasing and the lower resolution here.
We also get to see some image examples, and to a little surprise, the quality of this camera arrangement suffers. Bright lights capture a pronounced halo, and there is a diffuse quality to everything, as if the screen has a disruptive effect on light sources.
Selfie quality from Axon 20 (left) mod Note10 + (right)
Before this starts to sound also Negatively, keep in mind that this technology is still in its infancy, and like how folding screen phones are already getting much better, it might just take a generation or two before cameras under the screen really start to make a name for themselves.
