The "Holy Grail" of smartphone designs has just entered mass production, leaving Samsung's iPhone and Samsung Galaxy ranges to catch up.
Despite fierce competition, Chinese OLED maker Visionox
is the first to develop a forward-facing smartphone camera hidden entirely
under the screen. This opens the way for a new generation of full-screen
smartphones, with no unsightly edges (Google Pixels), notches (Apple iPhones)
or perforations (Samsung Galaxies).
Other manufacturers have worked on such a camera, but
according to a report published in ITHome (Chinese), Visionox is the first to
have a finished product ready for mass production. This could mean that iconic
Chinese products, which are already ahead in terms of camera performance, will
soon gain a significant design advantage over Apple and Samsung.
To create the new camera, Visionox has included a series
of proprietary technologies on a small secondary screen that sits above the
camera module, hiding it from view. The primary and secondary displays are
carefully calibrated to match each other in terms of brightness, color
rendering, and viewing angles to ensure a seamless experience. The company has
also designed a new manufacturing process that it believes will solve existing
capacity problems with similar technologies.
However, it remains to be seen exactly which smartphones
could use this technology. A secondary screen camera will always require a
compromise between camera quality and screen aesthetics, as a fully exposed
lens will always have the advantage of camera performance. Of course, iconic
smartphone customers will want the best of everything, but that will now mean
having to choose between a great conventional selfie camera or a hidden camera
that makes inevitable sacrifices in terms of image quality. At least now it's
an option.
We will likely see both types of front-facing cameras in
production for a while, but Apple and Samsung will have to evolve rapidly if
they want to stay ahead of smartphone design.
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