Oppo’s under-display camera is now official, here’s how it works

A recent teaser showing an Oppo phone with the front camera completely hidden under the display piqued our interest: Could the Chinese company be the first to launch a smartphone that’s all screen on the front, without any clumsy solutions such as notches or pop-up cameras?

Now, at MWC Shanghai, Oppo has officially unveiled its under-display camera tech, and while it certainly looks interesting, some questions remain. 

Oppo calls the technology USC (short for Under-Screen Camera), and claims it’s a “customized camera module that captures more light while leveraging optimized algorithms and AI learning to improve camera performance.” 

In hardware terms, Oppo uses a “highly-transparent” material for the display, claiming it strikes the balance between the display operating normally and allowing the light to pass through the screen. Oppo says the camera module itself has a “larger” aperture and sensor, as well as greater pixel size, though it’s unclear what the camera’s being compared with. 

Oppo also uses “zoning control” on the screen, controlling the pixels in the area above the camera; together these technologies allow sufficient light to pass through the screen that the under-display camera can work in typical usage scenarios, including taking selfies, face unlocking tech and video calls. 

Put all this together, and you get a selfie camera that — according to Oppo — “approaches” the quality seen on mainstream smartphones. We’ll read that as “not quite ready for production yet,” and indeed, Oppo doesn’t say when we’ll see the USC camera in a phone that’s actually being sold in stores. 

Still, the USC camera is an interesting development and one step forward towards a totally notch-less phone. Oppo’s launched a few innovative solutions for smartphones before, and while it typically took a while for them to reach the market, the company largely delivered on its promises.