A small Chinese smartphone company has figured out how to make a full-screen display without a notch or pop-up selfie camera
- Oppo, a Chinese smartphone maker, revealed its new technology called "under screen camera" (USC) that lets a selfie camera hide underneath a display.
- The USC lets Oppo include a selfie camera on smartphones without using a notch design, like the iPhone XS and countless other Android devices, or a mechanized pop-up system like you'd find on the OnePlus 7 Pro and Asus Zenfone 6.
- The tech may come with compromises to selfie camera quality, but Oppo hopes its software-based solutions will address some of the quality issues.
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Oppo - a small smartphone company compared to the likes of Apple or Samsung - revealed its new technology that lets selfie cameras hide beneath a smartphone's screen.
The technology, which Oppo showed off at the MWC Shanghai event, means that the smartphone can include an all-screen front surface without a notch or an alternative mechanical system to hide the selfie camera, like a pop-up selfie camera you'd find on the OnePlus 7 Pro, or the Asus Zenfone 6.
Oppo's "under screen camera" (USC) technology uses a custom material that's highly transparent to let light pass through to the lens, according to MacRumors.
Oppo's technology hasn't been tested yet, so whether it comes with compromises to selfie camera quality is still unknown.
Oppo admitted that USC selfie camera might not match the quality of a traditional selfie camera, and it developed software-based solutions to deal with some of the issues a camera hidden under a display might face, like haze, glare, and color issues.
So far, Oppo only announced the USC technology, not a smartphone that will actually come with an under screen selfie camera. The company plans to unveil a device with USC technology, but it's not exactly clear when.