Does your smartphone have a notch, a hole, or even a pop-up camera? Selfie cameras are one of the most divisive elements of modern smartphones, and they may be dropped one day with the introduction of under-screen selfie shooters.
The ZTE Axon 20 5G is the first commercially available smartphone with a selfie camera under the display, and we can confirm that it works.
We’ve been using the ZTE Axon 20 5G for a few weeks now and the selfie camera works well, but it’s not without its issues. Below we’ll show you some of the selfie shots it can take, and discuss our first impressions of the camera itself.
For more information on the phone in general, you can read our ZTE Axon 20 5G review. Here we tell you what happened to the selfie camera and how this is possible.
How does a selfie camera work under the screen?
This isn’t something ZTE has revealed itself, but an insightful JerryRigEverything disassembly video you can see below gives us a bit of a glimpse into how ZTE made this possible.
Essentially, the company has used two displays here. However, you do not notice that there are two screens.
There’s the standard 6.92-inch OLED panel that works like a normal smartphone screen, and then there’s a smaller square screen that sits on top of the selfie camera itself so the shooter can see through it.
There’s probably more to come, but this is the best information we have until ZTE clarifies the details. This will likely be how companies are incorporating this technology into future phones that we expect to include under-screen selfie cameras.
For example, we’ve seen patents from Samsung suggesting it is experimenting with similar technology. That could mean we’ll see it on future company phones like the Galaxy Note 21 or Galaxy Z Fold 3.
What do the selfies look like?
So what does selfie shooting look like on the ZTE Axon 20 5G? They are okay, but the camera quality is not phenomenal. This phone uses a 32 MP front camera with an aperture of f / 2.0.
Overall, the Axon 20 5G’s camera takes soft photos that have faint colors at best, but can be blown out at worst. We found that when most phone selfie cameras would perform well in good lighting, this camera felt blurry at best.
In dark conditions, we found that the Axon 20 5G’s selfie camera would lose detail and couldn’t compete with most other smartphones with similar specs on their front-facing shooters.
Overall, it’s not great and that seems to be partly due to the fact that it’s 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 ever replace the notch?
No one knows for sure if selfie cameras below the display will become the norm, but we expect the technology debut on more brands’ smartphones in 2021.
It will likely become an alternative to the selfie cameras with notches and holes in the coming years, but there is no guarantee that it will completely wipe out other manufacturers’ technology.
That’s especially true because the selfie camera underneath the display on ZTE’s phone isn’t seamless. You can see the selfie camera when using the smartphone, which isn’t helpful when the whole point of the tech is to hide the camera.
This is probably something we’ll improve in the future but at this point it doesn’t hide well under the phone’s screen, especially when you’re using that part of the screen.
However, this is a big step for the under-display technology to be available on a phone that you can buy, and we hope to see major improvements in this technology in the months and years to come.