Front camera behind the display? Let's get things straight!

Recently, Oppo unveiled a front-facing camera hidden under glass, and Xiaomi and Honor countered.

It seems that the new generation phones of the near future will no longer have a large or drop-shaped notch, no sliding front panel, no pop-up camera, nothing will be just the huge display, and behind the display there will be not only the fingerprint reader , but also the front camera. However, the porridge is not eaten so hot, it is easy to wait a while for the usable versions.

The industry and customers have, of course, welcomed the news of the new solution, as we can finally really get the wall-to-wall display, and you don’t have to deal with all sorts of magnetic bullshit like the Xiaomi MIX 3 with a sliding front. So the thing sounds really good, the prototypes are already working, but that means nothing. First of all, be aware that the solution can only work with AMOLED displays, as the IPS needs backlighting that the camera would obscure, so where there is a camera module we would not see anything from the displayed image.

In the case of AMOLED displays, this is not a problem either, because there the thickness of the panel will be the important point. Obviously, no matter how transparent (transparent) the panel is, it is not a clear glass, but with all the accessories of the display itself, which of course we cannot see with the naked eye, but they are still there. It’s no coincidence that none of the kings of OLED displays, Samsung, offer such a phone, though, if any company, it is Samsung that would be the first to receive a thin AMOLED display that would be suitable to hide behind the camera. Of course, the technology is already working now. The light transmittance is already adequate for a lot of sensors, so you can put an infrared sensor or proximity sensor behind the glass, but not a camera yet. More precisely, as can be seen from the engineering specimens presented, but when these will become a market-mature solution, few would probably dare to predict.

So the point is that the idea is good and we would be very happy if it worked, but in our opinion it is not worth expecting that by the end of the year there will be self-help cameras hidden behind the glass!