Does your smartphone have a notch, a hole, or even a pop-up camera? Selfie cameras are one of the elements that most divide modern smartphones, and it may be that one day they will be abandoned with the introduction of selfie photographers under the screen.
The ZTE Axon 20 5G is the first commercially available smartphone to feature a selfie camera under the screen, and we can confirm that it works.
We’ve been using the ZTE Axon 20 5G for a few weeks, and the selfie camera works well, but it has its problems. Below, we’ll show you some of the selfie photos she is able to take and explain our first impressions of the camera itself.
For more information on the phone in general, you can read our review of the ZTE Axon 20 5G. Here, we’ll talk about what happened to the selfie camera and how that’s possible.
How does a selfie camera under the screen work?
This is not something that ZTE revealed for itself, but a detailed video of JerryRigEverything that you can see below gives us an idea of how ZTE made it possible.
Basically, the company used two monitors here. You won’t notice that there are two screens.
There’s the standard 6.92-inch OLED panel that works like a normal smartphone screen, and there’s a smaller square screen that sits on top of the selfie camera itself to allow the sniper to spy.
There is likely to be more than that, but this is the best information we have until ZTE clarifies the details. This is likely to be the way companies will incorporate this technology into the next phones that we hope to include selfie cameras under the screen.
For example, we have seen patents from Samsung that suggest that it is experimenting with similar technology. This could mean that we see this on future company phones, like the Galaxy Note 21 or Galaxy Z Fold 3.
How are the selfies?
So, what are the selfie pictures like on the ZTE Axon 20 5G? They are fine, but the quality of the camera is not phenomenal. This phone uses a 32 MP front camera with an f / 2.0 aperture.
Overall, the Axon 20 5G’s camera takes soft photos that, at best, are faint colors, but at worst they can be dimmed. We found that when most phone selfie cameras worked well in good lighting, that camera looked cloudy at best.
In darker conditions, we found that the Axon 20 5G selfie camera would lose detail and could not compete with most other smartphones with similar specifications in its front photographers.
Overall, it’s not great and this seems to be partly due to the fact that it is covered with a screen on top of the selfie camera. That said, this is the first implementation of this technology, so we hope to see it improve on future smartphones.
Will it replace the notch?
No one knows for sure whether selfie cameras under the screen will become the norm, but we hope to see technology debut on smartphones from more brands over 2021.
It is likely to become an alternative to slit and puncture selfies in the years to come, but there is no guarantee that this will completely end technology from other manufacturers.
This is especially true because the selfie camera under the display on the ZTE phone is not perfect. You can see the selfie camera when using your smartphone, and this is not useful when the purpose of technology is to hide the camera.
This is likely to be something we will see improving in the future, but at the moment it does not hide well under the phone screen, especially when you are using that part of the display.
However, this is a big step towards making under-display technology available on a phone that you can buy, and we hope to see major improvements in this technology in the coming months and years.