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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: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2020, @07:01AM (7 children)
"Innovations" like these are what you do to differentiate your product from the competition when all products are basically identical.
Camera notches, this behind the screen camera, etc., are the 21st century equivalent of tail fins on a car: attention getters that are completely unnecessary and that, if anything, very marginally harm product performance.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday September 04 2020, @01:43PM (3 children)
Bad analogy in one way though because the tail fins are a huge visual cue whereas this behind-screen camera presumably won't be seen at all which will just make the phone look featureless and bland. I suppose the nearest car analogy would be a de-chromed, de-bumpered custom with shaved door handles. The difference is that those old cars had a lot of design flair just in their body shape. These phones don't, they're all just flat rounded cuboids.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2020, @02:40PM (1 child)
"... they're all just flat rounded cuboids"
Just like all today's cars are bubble-rectangleoids with rounded corners!
I just found a BETTER CAR ANALOGY!
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday September 04 2020, @05:36PM
Apple has a design patent on rectangles with rounded corners.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2020, @05:45PM
Add a slammed suspension and forklift tires and it's referred to as a "boom-hoopty".
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday September 04 2020, @08:25PM (2 children)
How do notches hurt performance? They just blend into the screen; full-screen apps don't use that extra space (on either side of the notch), so you're not missing anything.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2020, @10:22PM (1 child)
Apple talks a lot about elegance, simplicity, and clean design.
I find the notch to be a violation of all those. I suppose it's more an aesthetic defect (irregularity) to me than anything else.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2020, @10:32PM
Here's one way the notch asymmetry doesn't help: on phones without the notch, it is completely immaterial which way I hold my phone. I grab it with the power socket on the left or on the right, and the display is identical. Small thing, but I really like that feature.