Oppo’s efforts to eliminate the notch have led to the world’s first selfie camera that sits under your smartphone’s screen.
The new technology, which was showcased to the public at MWC Shanghai this week, will be making its way to commercial handsets “in the near future.” And it promises to be just as good as existing selfie cameras.
We’ve grown accustomed to notches now, but in an ideal world, we wouldn’t need them. Oppo is one of the companies working to eliminate them with new technologies that make speakers, cameras, and sensors disappear.
We’ve seen the Chinese company build phones with cameras and slide away, and speakers and fingerprint scanners that sit beneath a screen. Now it has developed the “Under-screen Camera.”
Oppo wants to eliminate notches
Oppo calls it a brand new solution for full-screen displays — which don’t require notches, bezels, or cutouts. The camera is almost invisible, and the display that covers it has no gaps to accommodate the camera’s lens.
OPPO's brand new solution for full-screen display – Under-screen Camera (USC) has just been unveiled here at #MWC19 Shanghai! #MoreThanTheSeen pic.twitter.com/k5qEQ3QNta
— OPPO India (@OPPOIndia) June 26, 2019
Of course, slapping a screen in front of a camera will reduce its photo quality, and cause unwanted effects like haze and glare. But Oppo is aware of that, and it has developed software algorithms that eliminate these issues.
The company promises that camera quality is “on par with mainstream devices.” However, we’ll have to wait and see whether its performance really lives up to those claims.
Coming soon to a phone near you
Fortunately, we won’t have to wait long. Oppo says it is planning to launch a new smartphone with an Under-screen Camera “in the near future.” We don’t have a more specific release date yet, but we hope to hear more this year.
iPhone fans will be hoping that Apple adopts similar technologies in the future so that its gorgeous edge-to-edge displays aren’t spoiled by notches. But we certainly don’t expect that to happen for a few years.
Unlike Oppo, Apple must meet the demand of tens of millions of customers around the world. It’s incredibly difficult to do that when you implement brand new technologies that are typically hard to produce until they have matured.
