Paul Monckton Senior Contributor FORBES
The ‘Holy Grail’ of smartphone designs has just gone into mass production, leaving Apple’s iPhone and Samsung’s Galaxy ranges to play catch-up.
Despite fierce competition, the Chinese OLED manufacturer, Visionox is first to develop a front-facing smartphone camera concealed entirely beneath the screen. This paves the way for a new generation of all-screen smartphones, without unsightly bezels (Google Pixels), notches (Apple iPhones) or punch-holes (Samsung Galaxies).
Other manufacturers have been working on such a camera, but according to a report in ITHome (Chinese), Visionox is the first to have a finished product ready for mass production. This could mean Chinese flagships, already ahead in terms of camera performance, will soon gain a significant design advantage over the likes of Apple and Samsung.
To create the new camera, Visionox has packed a number of patented technologies into a small secondary display that sits above the camera module, hiding it from view. The main and secondary displays are then carefully calibrated to match each other in terms of brightness, color reproduction and viewing angles to ensure a seamless experience. The company has also devised a new manufacturing process which it claims will circumvent existing capacity issues with similar technologies.
It remains to be seen, however, exactly which smartphones might make use of this technology. An under-screen camera will always require a compromise between camera quality and display aesthetics as a fully-exposed lens will always have the edge in camera performance. Flagship smartphone customers will, of course, want the best of everything, but that will now mean having to choose between an excellent conventional selfie-camera or a hidden one that makes unavoidable sacrifices in image quality. At least it is now an option.
It’s likely we’ll see both types of front camera in production for quite some time to come, but Apple and Samsung will need to move fast if they are to remain at the forefront of smartphone design.
