Oppo unveils a new under-screen selfie camera smartphone

The past couple of years smartphone design have been dominated by debate over the best to increase the screen-to-body ratio. The holy grail is, of course, the ability to integrate the selfie camera directly into the display which we’ve already seen with fingerprint scanners. We have seen a pop-up camera on Oneplus, Samsung, Oppo and Huawei smartphones. But the downside of this feature is that it is way slower to unluck your phone with facial recognition. Most of the people prefer to have a fast way to unlock there phone, that’s why smartphone companies are trying to create smartphones which do not have this downside.

The company Oppo is one of the first companies who made the under-screen selfie camera a reality. Oppo says the display uses a custom transparent material that works with a redesigned pixel structure so that light can get through to the camera. The sensor itself is said to be larger than other selfie cameras, with a wider aperture lens in front. The area of the screen reserved for the camera still works with touch control, Oppo says the screenquality stays the same over the whole screen. The only time you can see the camera is when you tilt the screen down, that’s the only time you can see the selfie camera (it’s still quite difficult to see).

When will this smartphone come out? you might ask. Oppo plans to launch a device with an under-screen camera “in the near future.” So it’s going to take a while until this technology is going to be used on commercial smartphones.