- [Michael] For over 50 years "Star Trek"
has raised a never-ending parade of questions.
What's the true definition of sentients?
How far should you go to preserve your principles?
And since when do Seattle-based radio psychiatrists
get offered command of starships?
But as a ten-year-old watching,
my most important question never got answered.
How are all these face-to-face conversations
happening over the view screen,
with not a single camera in sight?
Well it turns out that we don't have to wait
300 years to find out
because thanks to smartphones like this,
we now know that you can hide your camera
right under the display.
(upbeat music)
This is the Axon 20 5G from ZTE.
It's not exciting for any reason
other than the selfie camera
so that's what we'll focus on in this video.
And in case you're wondering
why that breakthrough is significant
just take a look at modern mobile design.
For the past decade, manufacturers have tried
to serve two diametrically opposed masters.
They wanna maximize how much screen
they're able to squeeze into a smartphone
while at the same time leaving enough room
for the front-facing camera.
A camera that's become all the more important
in the age of all of us socially starved shut-ins
jumping on video calls every five minutes.
Up until now, most companies
have solved this tug of war
by carving out space for the camera in the display.
The first in the form of a notch
and more recently the hole punch.
And in between there've been some interesting alternatives
like pop-up camera's peppered in,
but with each approach there are challenges.
Notches are distracting at best and ugly at worst,
pop-up camera's add weight and make repairs harder
and hole punch designs are incompatible
with wide-angle cameras.
And let's be real, they're not much less
goofy looking than notches.
So, why not just build the display
right over the camera?
Back in June, consumer tech heavyweights
Oppo and Xiaomi announced within hours of one another
that they'd finally figured out how to do it,
but it was ZTE that beat both of them to the punch
with the first production model that you can actually buy.
That's this one, the Axon 20 5G.
It launched in China in September
and goes on sale globally today for about 450 bucks.
A competitive price that reflects
its mid-range spec sheet
but belies the wizardry lurking beneath.
Here's how it works,
as you can see there still is a notch of sorts here
to accommodate the front-facing camera.
Which is a 32 megapixel unit
outputting at eight megapixels.
The difference is that the display
doesn't terminate at the borders of the notch,
it continues across the gulf
and it's been modified in the area over the lens.
In this tiny little patch
the screens pixels have been physically shrunken.
So light can go around them
to reach the camera beneath.
Okay check it out when I dropped
the notification shade in camera mode
you can yeah, you can see the,
what I presume is the is the pixel matrix
of the display as seen by the camera.
It's a pretty wild.
The Axon 20's display
was almost certainly provided by Visionox,
a company that sells OLED screens
to several manufacturers
and whose marketing videos are useful
in illustrating the complexities of this design.
In addition to shrinking
the pixel size over the camera
the seven layers of the display had to be treated
to reduce reflections and diffraction,
while at the same time preserving their conductivity
and of course the hardware is only part of the story.
The final step in the process takes place in software
because the camera's quality is still so compromised
by the presence of the display hardware
sitting right over the lens,
a set of algorithms are applied
to process the image and make it usable.
So what's it like to actually use?
Well if you've been paying attention
to some of these video samples,
you'll probably be able to tell
that it's not quite time
to say goodbye to the notch
or the hole punch just yet.
As it stands today,
both sides of the tech have compromises.
Despite ZTE apparently promising on Weibo
that the camera's images
would have no glare or fogging,
just look at all this glare and fogging.
Every time I take a selfie,
I feel like a lady guest star
on the original "Star Trek" all of whom were filmed
only after a generous dollop of Vaseline
was spread across the camera lens.
What I'm saying is the pictures are soft
almost out of focus.
And before you say it, yes my lens was clean
and no, beauty mode was not enabled.
It's also not a wide-angle camera
the colors aren't great in low light.
The digital noise just ratchets, right.
It's not a selfie shooter I'd ever want to use.
And on the aesthetic side,
the camera's camouflage is far from perfect.
The phone's full HD screen
already has a fairly low pixel density.
So reducing pixel size over the camera
makes for a very fuzzy zone.
But you know how I always say
that the creases on folding phones
basically vanish when you stop looking for them?
Well, the same goes here.
When you stop actively trying
to spot the gimmick, the magic trick works.
It's even more impressive when you stop to consider
there's also an acoustic driver
crammed under the screen to serve as the earpiece,
which is only slightly muffled
compared to a standard speaker.
Probably the thing that excites me the most
about this technology is how quickly it's moving.
Well Xiaomi has yet to ship its own take on this.
It's already working on a third generation
of the experimental technology
and it's claiming significant gains
in both picture quality and masking.
And as Ron in ARS Technica technical points out
really an under display camera
is just a highly refined version of something else
lurking under the Axon 20 screen
the optical fingerprint reader.
If you'll recall,
I first showed you this technology at CES 2018
and it's gone from finicky, slow, and visible
to reliable, fast, and invisible
in less than three years.
So I'd guess it likely that by 2024,
most smartphones will have one
or more cameras mounted beneath the screen.
Finally relegating the notch to the dustbin of history.
And of course, this will pose some privacy concerns.
Today it's easy to stick a finger
or even a piece of tape
over the camera on your phone,
if you're looking to prevent
surreptitious surveillance or a Zoom faux pas.
When the camera is hidden
somewhere under the display, not so much.
And that brings me to my last point
which is an important one.
Hopefully that will accelerate development
of something Android needs anyway.
An indicator light that tells the user
when the phones cameras are being used.
Apple recently brought this feature to iOS 14
which I applauded in my road trip reviews
of the iPhone 12 family.
And with camera's about to dive
under our displays like spy subs,
Android users shouldn't have to rely
on a third-party app to ape this functionality.
That concern aside, I'm very much looking forward
to the new phones and features
that designers and developers will dream up.
Now that yet another constraint
on mobile design is falling away.
The Axon 20 5G is available now.
This video was produced following four days
with an Axon 20 5G review sample provided by ZTE.
As always no compensation
was provided by the manufacturer
nor did I offer copy approval or an early preview.
That means ZTE is seeing
this right alongside you for the first time.
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more videos like this on YouTube.
Until next time, thanks for watching
and if you can't stay home, then stay safe
and mask up while you stay mobile my friends.