A little while ago we talked about rotating front cameras which had phased out of the market. Recently these have started reappearing in our smartphones, the most popular being the Zenfone 6, which we covered recently.

All in all, while providing features that we desire, like a display with no interruptions and a great front camera, manufacturers started including moving components in their smartphones, but now, Chinese manufacturer Oppo has gone ahead and unveiled to the world, their working prototype of an under-display front camera. This article will tell you about everything that we know and our thoughts about this.

Oppo has been making waves in the smartphone world with exciting designs for sure, they had the Find X start it all, recently the Reno with its ‘shark fin’ pop-up camera and ‘periscopic’ capability got quite the attention, and now they have the new camera which they announced at MWC 2019 in Shanghai.

Oppo had provided a teaser earlier this month on their twitter handle, and as reported by Engadget, VP Brian Shen also posted on Weibo saying, “At this stage, it’s difficult for under-display cameras to match the same results as normal cameras, there’s bound to be some loss in optical quality. But, no new technology jumps to perfection right away.”

Also read: What is a Time of Flight Camera (ToF) and why are phone manufacturers using it?

How are they doing this?

Coming to how Oppo is doing this, the company says that they are using a customised transparent material for the display which works with their redesigned pixel structure that allows light to pass onto the camera. A sensor with an aperture wider than other selfie cameras and size larger than the current standard is at use here.

The company has said that problems like images with haze and glare will be prevalent initially and some colour casting will be needed to even out as these reduce the image quality with the screen in front of the glass. These issues have been tackled by the company with the help of software as they say that algorithms have been developed which tune the hardware to address this.

The company claims that the quality is on par with mainstream devices with the help of the software, but only time will tell when the technology makes it to the market. On a side note, the display quality will not be affected at all, according to Oppo. Any development in the technology world is good for consumers. Samsung with the foldable displays and Oppo with the under-display stuff, this will lead to some excitement for consumers in a market which has been hovering around stagnancy.

Moving parts in a phone may sound cool and what not, but they always bring with them the liability of failure and in some cases take away features like water resistance. Personally, the front camera’s quality is not of much importance as long as it is acceptable but having a high-quality display running all across while housing a camera underneath without any interruptions sure sounds cool.

So Oppo’s advancements are something that I’m looking forward to changing the scene in the smartphone world, just like notches and in-display fingerprint scanners did.

Also read: OnePlus 7 Pro: From Flagship killer to simply a flagship?