Oppo showcases a smartphone with the world's first under-screen selfie camera

Oppo, a company that appears to be obsessed with the idea of a truly bezel-less phone, just took to the MWC Shanghai show-floor to unveil the world’s first working smartphone prototype with an under-screen selfie camera. Earlier this month, the Chinese smartphone company did **tease that the technology would be on display at MWC Shanghai** but did not reveal much about the workings behind it. Oppo claims that the display uses a custom transparent material that features a redesigned pixel structure, allowing light to pass through to the camera. The sensor itself is also claimed to be larger than other selfie cameras, with a wider aperture lens in front. [caption id=“attachment_6886221” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”] Oppo’s prototype smartphone with an under-display selfie camera. Image: Oppo[/caption] The display area over the camera still works with touch control, and Oppo says that display quality doesn’t get compromised. Images of the prototype, however, do reveal that the camera underneath does show itself a wee bit at certain angles. As per a report by The Verge, Oppo does note that putting a screen in front of a camera will, in turn, reduce photo image quality. But company officials did clarify that the algorithms developed for the phone are tuned to the hardware in order to deal with these inherent issues. In fact, Oppo’s going far enough to claim that the quality of images shot with the front camera is “on par with mainstream devices.”

OPPO's brand new solution for full-screen display - Under-screen Camera (USC) has just been unveiled here at #MWC19 Shanghai! #MoreThanTheSeen pic.twitter.com/k5qEQ3QNta

— OPPO India (@OPPOIndia) June 26, 2019

How accurate is that bit of information? Well, we’ll only know once we’ve tried the tech for ourselves. Now, Oppo isn’t quite ready with a commercially available phone which features the new under-screen camera, but the company did mention that a phone will be launched “in the near future”.

The algorithms behind our USC technology showcased at #MWC19 include haze removal, HDR and white balance resulting in a bezel-less phone, yet with a selfie camera that rivals current smartphones in the market today. #MoreThanTheSeen pic.twitter.com/yTpWgIMLmA

— OPPO (@oppo) June 26, 2019

More from News & Analysis

What is the US HIRE Bill and why is India’s $250-billion IT sector worried? Is the internet dead? What's this theory that OpenAI's Sam Altman says might be true?

Given the fact that Oppo does show off new tech only months before a commercial launch — as was the case with its 10x zoom capable periscope lens tech which we saw debut with the Reno — we won’t be surprised to see a phone before the end of the year.