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| The camera under the screen is getting better...but slowly |
More and more smartphone manufacturers are using cameras at the bottom of the screen to remove cracks or bumps. But these cameras, still in their infancy, have their own weaknesses.
This technique is a good idea in theory because if you can put the selfie camera under the screen, it doesn't require any bumps or holes. But the first attempt had some problems.
Like new technology, the camera under the screen didn't make a good first impression. The Axon 20, which ZTE released last year, was the first phone with an under-display camera, but it was terrible.
The camera quality is also poor and the screen area looks less practical than the notches. Samsung adopted this method on the Galaxy Z Fold 3 and had similar issues.
But the situation is getting better. Two new phones on the market, the Mix 4 from Xiaomi and the Axon 30 from ZTE, use different technical methods and have been improved over the previous generation.
Instead of letting light fall into the lower resolution camera screen area, this reduces pixel size without reducing pixel count.
This means that it is difficult to see the part of the screen that covers the camera during normal use. If one compares the position of the camera at the bottom of the Axon 30's screen with the position of the Axon 20's camera on a white background, the difference becomes very clear, as on older phones it is difficult to hide the camera.
The camera at the bottom of the screen can become the new normal
It is now clear that cameras are still vulnerable to attack compared to cameras that do not need to capture the light behind the screen. ZTE and Xiaomi rely heavily on post-processing algorithms. And you can see it because the live image preview is much worse than the final image.
The results always look cumbersome and unnatural, although they are more beneficial than the previous ones. The video quality is also poor as these phones are hard to process in real time.
Most of the time, however, the images you get from the camera at the bottom of the screen are available. Unless you use the front camera a lot or use your phone for Zoom calls, you might not even notice.
If these use cases are important to you, it is best not to use a phone with a camera at the bottom of the screen.
However, it is not just about reducing the size of the edge of the phone. The Microsoft Applied Science team is developing a lower-screen camera for a completely different reason so that you can maintain eye contact while looking at the screen during a video call.