The Invisible Selfie Camera! By Marques Brownlee

Hey, what's up MHD here and new phone, this is the ZTE axon 20 5g, so you might have heard of this phone already, but also probably not it's a fairly standard, Jewish mid-grade phone and looking at it, you might not notice anything super different. It's a big phone! Of course, it does have this orange faux leather, finish, quad cameras on the back, pretty big display doesn't look like anything too crazy. We haven't seen before well, except one thing: this phone does have one thing: we've never seen before in any other phone. It's actually up here at the top. You can kind of catch that maybe how about if we maybe, if we zoom in a little, maybe you can see it a little better now or if we switch to a macro camera, you can kind of see it. Ah, there it is now you can see what I'm talking about.

So this phone has the world's first under display selfie camera. If we weren't in the middle of a global pandemic, I would love to do a video going out to people on the street and handing them this phone and saying you notice anything different about this screen because I just feel like almost no one would actually pick up on it, because, if you're not looking for it, it's almost invisible but the second. You notice it. You can't unnoticed it, but we all knew this was coming. We've seen multiple parts of smartphones work towards this perfect all screen phone thing for a while.

Now we saw the fingerprint reader go from the button to underneath the display. We even saw speakers on some phones go from above the display to right behind it, vibrating through the glass. So the last thing left, which is also the hardest thing, has been the camera. So our eye has gotten kind of used to all these notches and cutouts and hole punches in almost every new smartphone display these days somewhere around the top, either in the middle or the corner. That's just a cut-out a hole in the screen.

You're going to have to have for the selfie camera and there were other methods like pop-up cameras of different sizes and shapes, and while they technically did help achieve the goal of the seamless front display thing- and I happen to really like them- for the security benefit of blocking the selfie camera, when it's not in use, it was a loss in pretty much every other category to the manufacturer. It's a moving part in a phone which introduces higher probability of a failure. Point it's worse and more difficult for waterproofing. It costs more. It takes up more space in the phone, so I liked them, but they've been kind of a work around the whole time.

So this was the inevitable thing that new technology that would allow us to put the camera behind the display and now that I've actually used it and looked at it. I can see why no one else has shipped it yet. So, first, it's not a super high-end display. It's a nice screen, but it's not super bright. It's a 6.9 inch, pretty big OLED at 1080p and 90 hertz, fine, it's a 4 to 500 phone, but right up there at the top, you can see there's something a little different going on and when you really look for it well, it's really obvious. So, let's get technical for a second to explain, what's actually happening here.

There are a few things necessary to make this happen. You have the 32 megapixel camera itself back there inside the phone. Then you have basically a notch cutout in the display, but the display itself continues over this notch in essentially half the pixel density, so 720p equivalent resolution with smaller pixels, so there's actually space between the pixels for the camera to see through and then, when you actually open the selfie camera, and it's on there's a driver manipulating those remaining pixels to make them semi-transparent. And lastly, there's literally a defogging algorithm running to help the camera software figure out. What's behind those semi-transparent pixels, then it merges it all together into one image and that image is not great.

It's impressive that it works, of course, but the selfies are soft, like Charmin soft. They look like uh the lens maybe had like some fingerprints smeared over it or something, but no. This is the way it looks. This is the image the camera produces now. How much of that is due to the fact that this is a 400 ZTE phone selfie camera versus the fact that it's a brand new one-of-a-kind selfie camera technology hard to say, but I mean this is, like literal best case, world-class lighting situation, and this is how it looks, so it's clear that there's a bit of an image quality trade-off here.

Most of the noticeably bad parts of these selfies is in the highlights so like anytime, there's bright light or something where a lot of light should be shining through the semi-transparent pixels. Well, you can start to see the semi-transparent pixels that aren't quite disappearing and kind of add a haze to everything you can even pull the white notification shade over the selfie camera. While the video is recording and see pretty much, all of those pixels light up, which is crazy, the trade-off is real, but if that's the trade-off just to hide the camera, then the real question is how hidden is the camera and uh? It's a different answer for different, even I'm. Looking at it now, it's its different in different situations. So when the camera is off, and you have a dark image or something sort of dark happening at the top of the display, it's impressively hidden like it's actually pretty good and if you're, if you're looking for it, you'll see it but most of the time you're looking at the display head-on at other stuff, and it's not distracting its kind of like the notch or the hole punch camera.

It just disappears to your eye after a while, but even more since the image goes over the notch. I think it looks best in this case, but what I noticed is the lighter the pixels or the brighter the UI, the more jarring those pixels get, and because now the half resolution and all the gaps between the pixels are way more, contrasted and obvious here. So whether you're, looking at it straight or at an angle, if stuff is bright, it's going to be visible like this. Are you can see here what it looks like when I pull down the notification shade over it? You can see this is maybe worst case scenario, but like the pixel by pixel row lag and the pix elation of everything happening here so yeah, it's clearly nowhere near perfect, but for a first version it feels about right. You know for as much as we talk about other companies like the Samsung and apples of the world.

They would never ship this, and so we need companies like ZTE to be taking that tech risk and to be putting the stuff out there to get that ball rolling, because now we actually have something to work with and judge the quality of a new tech on this. Is this is fascinating stuff? So now my big thought while testing this is: how much better can it get and will it actually get better quickly, because when you think about it, all these other under display technologies that we've been working with smartphones for the last few years, started off bad and then got on this curve getting pretty good quickly. The under display speakers started off bad today. They are slightly quieter and slightly more muffled than a regular speaker, but they're pretty close they're, pretty close. The under display fingerprint readers again started off slow, but they're close now, they're, just slightly slower and slightly less reliable than the old gold standard touch I'd button.

So it's no surprise that the first under screen, selfie camera, is bad, but how long before it's only a tiny bit softer and hazier than a normal selfie camera, then how fast does it get good? I actually got to speak briefly with some of the people who are literally working on this, and they're already working on future generations of this tech that we'll see better in later phones, and they are very confident that they can hide this better with better pixel matching and better lines of resolution. But again that's uh, the other half is how good will the picture quality look but here's another question: what does this mean for privacy like if this technology gets perfect? What does this mean for like how screens of the future will look like? My initial thought was? Oh now, if we don't know where the selfie camera is in a phone, we won't really know where to look when taking a selfie like will we look at the side or the corner, or maybe it's in the middle someday? But, to be honest, you probably just correct the way. The eyes look with software FaceTime already. Does this Surface Pro x already? Does this? So that's that's not even new, but does that mean laptops of the future will be able to put the selfie camera anywhere, maybe further from the edge in the middle, and can they be on any time like? If I don't have an indicator of any type I it could just be on all the time. Like imagine a hotel room TV with a camera behind it, that's terrifying, so that's definitely something I'm going to be keeping an eye on.

I think the next logical step when this stuff starts to happen more often is to add an indicator light in the software somewhere, so that we know when the camera is on, like iOS did, so there's less privacy concerns and I can feel as comfortable at least as I did with those pop-up selfie cameras. But let me know what you think of this whole idea of putting the camera behind the display. I was originally gonna. Ask like: do you think it's worth it? Do you think hiding the camera is worth the worse image quality, but I think in this first one it's its pretty clear? No, it's not worth the trade-off, but my question to you is in the future: if this gets perfect, do you actually even want your display to be hidden? Do you really want that full screen beautiful phone at the expense of not knowing where the camera is? Let me know what you think and shout out to today's video sponsor the ridge wallet, a sleek industrial lightweight, modern wallet, so it doesn't bulge out, but it doesn't have to it's just a modern wallet, unlike what most people have been carrying, which was designed a long time ago, once you realize you don't need to be carrying around receipts and pictures and gift cards, you might as well upgrade to a modern wallet to match your modern wallet situation, so the ridge wallet holds up to 12 cards, plus room for cash, there's over 30, colors and styles at this point, including stuff like carbon, fiber or titanium, and it's well-built to the point where they also offer a lifetime warranty. So you could buy this one wallet and carry it for life, which is pretty sweet, there's also a 45-day return policy.

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Source : Marques Brownlee