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ZTE announces the world's first phone with a behind-the-screen camera:
ZTE has officially announced the world's first commercial phone with a behind-the-screen camera: the ZTE Axon 20 5G. Shrinking phone bezels have made locating the front camera a major design point of phones for the past few years. We've seen big camera notches, small camera notches, round camera cutouts, and pop-up cameras. Rather than any of those compromises, the under-display camera lets you just put the camera under the display, and by peering through the pixels, you can still take a picture. It's the holy grail of front-camera design.
As we've seen in explainers from Xiaomi, these under-display cameras work by thinning out the pixels above the display, either by reducing the number of pixels or by making the pixels smaller, which allows more light to reach the camera. In the area above the camera, manufacturers will have to strike a balance between a denser display with lower-quality camera results or better camera output in exchange for an uglier above-the-camera display.
Also at CNX Software.
See also: Xiaomi's Third Generation Under-Display Camera Tech is Everything I Want
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2020, @05:33AM (3 children)
I'll bet the customer is government. Please, put cameras on devices that people won't tape over. That they won't put lens caps or other blockers on.
And now, make it sound like a good thing! Yes, make our targets think you're doing them a favour, so they'll embrace it!
Oh, and maybe we'll have enough juice under the hood that the spyware we add will feel less onerous? Can we do that?
Yeees, that's a good little collaborator. Here, have some belly rubs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2020, @07:03AM (1 child)
I would think that if a nefarious agent were behind this, that they would have kept it secret, so that no-one would suspect that the video display doubled as a camera to spy on them.
Releasing this as a new feature on a phone sort of ruins the possibility of sneaking it into other models. Now folks will be looking for it.
Of course now we will need shades to cover all our phone displays - it's the only way to be sure.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Bot on Friday September 04 2020, @08:26AM
Good thinking but hiding in plain sight is the only long term viable option. Nobody can leak what is already out there.
Sooner or later one repairman would notice strange circuitry. So they simply advertise the feature. Same as publishing the patents for coronaviruses, in fact.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2020, @08:35PM
exactly. this is all about hiding the fucking spy device and protecting it from user freedom. fuck the scum phone companies and the dumb whores who rent the latest one they can get irrespective of how hostile the whole situation is.