camera behind lcd screen price

For decades, we’ve lived with an inconvenient technological truth: Cameras and other sensors cannot occupy the same space as our screens. It’s why, increasingly, smartphones rely on the dreaded “notch” as a way of maximizing screen-to-body ratios while preserving the front-facing camera and other sensors.

Some phone makers, from Oppo to OnePlus, get around this problem by using motorized pop-up cameras, while others have resorted to punching holes in displays to provide the camera with its own peephole. It’s also why even the latest high-end laptops still have pronounced bezels around their displays. The webcam needs a home and it seems no one is willing to live with a notch or hole-punch on a computer.

But it turns out that cameras and screens aren’t quite as incompatible as they seem. Thanks to improvements in manufacturing techniques, these two adversaries are about to end their long-standing territorial dispute. This isn’t a far-flung prediction; it’s happening right now.

Complaining about a phone notch, hole-punch or a large screen bezel is the very definition of a first-world problem. And judging from Apple’s stellar sales numbers, none of these side effects of forward-facing cameras are dealbreakers for buyers.

First, it lets you make phones that have true edge-to-edge screens. Videos and photos look better, and app developers can make use of every square millimeter for their designs — all while keeping the phone’s body as small as possible.

Second, from a design and manufacturing point of view, if cameras and sensors can be placed anywhere, with fewer restrictions on their size and visibility, it redraws the map for phone design. Bigger batteries, thinner phones, more sensors, and much better cameras are all potential upsides.

Cameras placed in bezels or notches create the now all-too-familiar, awkward downward gaze that happens during video calls. “Most of the time, you’re not actually looking at each other when you’re talking over video chat,” Michael Helander, CEO at Toronto-based OTI Lumionics told Digital Trends. “The current placement of videoconferencing cameras in all of these devices is really suboptimal.”

Helander has probably thought about this problem more than most. His company creates specialty materials that enable what was once impossible — making displays transparent enough that you can place a camera behind them.

Once a camera is sitting behind the display, it will finally make our video interactions look and feel like real, in-person interactions — a game changer that couldn’t come at a better time in our COVID-restricted world.

Screen technology is dominated by two kinds of displays. The most common are liquid crystal displays (LCD), which include LED TVs and QLED TVs. The second, organic light-emitting diode (OLED), dominates smartphones and tablets, and is growing in use in laptops and even desktop monitors

LCDs are actually transparent when not in use — that’s why you see a gray background on a calculator screen wherever the black digit segments aren’t active. But taking advantage of this transparency to take a photo poses big technical hurdles, especially once you factor in the need for a backlight.

One solution favored by Xiaomi and Oppo in their UDC prototypes is to rely on an OLED pixel’s inherent transparency. When an OLED pixel isn’t being used to emit light, it lets light in. So you can place a camera behind an OLED display and it will be able to gather enough light to capture images. But there’s a catch: You still need to place the camera at the top or bottom of the screen, because when the camera is active, the OLED pixels above it must be shut off, which creates a temporary black area on the screen. That approach is a solution to the notch and hole-punch problem, but it does nothing to solve the downward gaze issue.

The first commercially available phone with an under-display camera — the ZTE Axon 20 5G — uses this technique, but it also suffers from a less-than-ideal compromise. Modern smartphones have incredibly densely packed pixels. The iPhone 12 Pro has a 460ppi (pixels per inch) display, which means that there are more than 200,000 pixels in one square inch. Sony’s Xperia XZ Premium had a whopping 807ppi screen (more than 650,000 pixels per square inch).

Punching holes in between those pixels, even with a laser, is so tricky that ZTE had to remove some pixels from the area above the camera to buy some extra room. The result is a noticeably lower-resolution square on the screen.

A lower-resolution section of the screen might not bother you when it’s near the top, in an area that’s used mostly for inconsequential information. But few people would accept such an obvious reduction of resolution in the center of their phone’s display, which is what we would need to counteract the downward-gaze problem.

Helander claims the self-assembly process works on any screen size, and lets manufacturers decide how many openings are needed — from just one to 1 billion.

As exciting as it is to think that we’ll soon be able to have much more natural video calls, placing a camera under a display puts an even bigger onus on manufacturers to provide trustworthy privacy measures.

We’ll need some kind of reliable indicator of when the camera is active and an equally reliable way of disabling it. Because it’s under the screen, there’s no way to physically block the lens without blocking content on the screen as well.

Apple recently updated iOS to show a small green dot near the notch when its forward-facing camera is in use, and an orange dot to show when the mic is active. That’s a good way to inform us of what’s going on, but we need something more.

Smart speakers like the Google Nest mini ship with physical switches that can be used to disable the microphones. Assuming that there’s no way to remotely overcome the switch’s position, it provides a very good level of trust. A similar mechanism on TVs, monitors, and laptops should come standard once cameras become invisible.

OTI Lumionics already has agreements in place with several Chinese smartphone manufacturers, but due to confidentiality restrictions, these companies can’t be named just yet. “Many of them have prototype phones that have been built and everything looks great,” Helander notes, “but none of them want to disclose anything publicly until they’re ready for their actual official product announcements.” He’s confident that we’ll see these new under-display camera models sometime in 2021, although they may remain a Chinese market exclusive until 2022.

As is often the case with new technology, under-display cameras didn’t make a great first impression. It’s a nice idea in theory, of course — you don’t need a notch or a hole-punch if you can put a selfie camera under the display — but the earliest efforts had some issues.

ZTE’s Axon 20 last year was the first phone to ship with one, and it was bad. The camera quality was incredibly poor, and the area of the screen looked more distracting than a notch. Samsung followed up this year with the Galaxy Z Fold 3, which had similar issues.

But things are actually getting better. Two newer phones on the market, Xiaomi’s Mix 4 and ZTE’s Axon 30, use a different approach to the technology, and it’s an improvement on the previous generation. Instead of having a lower resolution area of the screen that allows light through to the camera, they shrink the size of the pixels without reducing the number.

This means that the part of the screen that covers the camera is really difficult to see in normal use. Look at how the Axon 30 compares to the Axon 20 on a white background, which was the most challenging situation for the older phone to disguise the camera in. It’s also much harder to make out than the camera on Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 3:

ZTE’s Axon 20 on the left, and the newer Axon 30 on the right. The area of the screen that covers the selfie camera is much less noticeable on the Axon 30.

Now, the camera is clearly still compromised compared to one that doesn’t have to gather light from behind a screen. ZTE and Xiaomi lean hard on algorithms for post-processing — you can tell because the live image preview looks much worse than the final picture. The results still look over-processed and unnatural, even if they’re more usable than their predecessors’. Video quality is also bad, because it’s probably too much to ask for these phones to do the processing in real time.

There’s more to the idea than just reducing the size of your phone bezels, though. We spoke to Steven Bathiche from Microsoft’s Applied Sciences group on how the company is working on under-display cameras for an entirely different reason — so you can maintain eye contact while looking at your screen on video calls.

To grossly oversimplify it, there are two challenges behind making an under-display camera (UDC): to convincingly hide the camera under the screen and to produce images that look as good as traditional selfie cameras. With its third-gen UDC on the Axon 40 Ultra, ZTE has nailed the “hide the camera” part of that challenge. As for “take good photos,” ZTE has come a long way on that since its first attempt, but there’s still work to be done.

First, some basics: this is a 16-megapixel camera residing under a 6.8-inch 2480 x 1116 OLED panel. On the back of the phone, there are three 64-megapixel cameras: a 16mm-equivalent ultrawide; a stabilized 35mm standard wide; and a stabilized 91mm telephoto lens. ZTE has made some improvements to the computational imaging algorithms for its rear camera system, but I won’t be covering that here or much else about the phone, really, aside from its most intriguing feature: the selfie camera.

If you want a much more nuanced explanation of under-display camera technology — and why it’s so difficult to develop — I highly recommend you watch my former colleague Sam Byford’s video on the subject. It puts into context just how impressive this achievement is, even for a work in progress. For one, the technology concealing the camera under the display has gotten really good. ZTE’s press release says that the screen area over the camera is integrated with the rest of the screen more smoothly in this iteration, with some tweaks to its independent pixel drive technology and how those pixels’ circuits are wired. There have also been some software updates to better synchronize the UDC’s part of the screen with the rest of the display.

You don’t need to understand any of that to recognize that ZTE has worked some magic here. The selfie camera really does disappear into the rest of the screen almost all of the time. During the time I spent setting up the phone, I truly forgot about it — maybe even the entire concept of punch-holes and notches. I guess that’s the highest compliment I can pay it: most of the time I used it, it was just a screen. You can’t say that about the under-screen camera in Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 3, which is always obviously there.

If I really look for it, I can see the camera when I’m using the phone. The lens is visible outside in bright light, but it’s not distracting. Indoors, if I turn the screen brightness way down, I can see it a little better, but I still have to actually look for it. Even with white screens, which challenged previous versions of the display, it’s very hard to spot. Job well done, ZTE engineers.

The camera side of the UDC has seen some image processing improvements, and in some situations, the results look good enough to pass as a standard selfie camera selfie. If you look closely, you can see some artifacts signaling that something different is going on; in some bright outdoor shots, there’s a little bit of color bleeding between my skin and the black shirt I’m wearing.

Backlighting is also very challenging for the camera. You can see lots of flare and sometimes a grid pattern across the image with the sun hitting the camera directly. ZTE relies on its image processing to sharpen selfies and clean up some of the blooming you can see in the live preview, which generally works, but it just can’t contend with direct sunlight. Video is another sore spot: the phone can’t perform all of that processing in real-time, so clips look very soft, even in good lighting.

Selfies indoors look softer than selfies from a traditional front-facing camera, but in decent lighting, they’re just regular bad — not “what the hell is going on here” bad. That’s an improvement. Light sources sometimes appear with a distracting grid pattern across them, which seems like a tough one to solve in software. In lower light conditions, images get very soft, and the on-screen flash isn’t terribly flattering.

Side by side with a standard selfie camera on a Google Pixel 6 Pro, there’s still a noticeable difference in image quality. Looking at the Axon 40 Ultra’s selfies in isolation, though, I’m not sure most people would spot that drop in image quality provided there’s no light source behind the subject or sunlight directly on the lens. With the display piece of the puzzle sorted out, maybe ZTE’s UDC tech is a couple of generations away from “good enough” for most people.

But then there’s another question to answer: do most people actually hate the notches and hole-punches on their phone displays? Or have we trained our brains to edit them out of our view when we’re looking at our phones? The best-case scenario — the one ZTE has achieved in the Axon 40 Ultra — is that an under-display camera disappears. But I think that most of us are all so used to the selfie cameras that we’ve essentially made them disappear from our conscious attention, too. Like bezels and status bars, we just stop seeing them after a while. ZTE’s engineers deserve praise for what they have achieved here, but I’m not sure that the problem they’re solving is one that bothers many people.

There"s not much in the way of independent footage of this phone, but YouTuber AmazTech has thoughtfully pointed a flashlight at the display, which reveals the camera.

ZTE has officially announced the world"s first commercial phone with a behind-the-screen camera: the ZTE Axon 20 5G. Shrinking phone bezels have made locating the front camera a major design point of phones for the past few years. We"ve seen big camera notches, small camera notches,round camera cutouts, and pop-up cameras. Rather than any of those compromises, the under-display camera lets you just put the camera under the display, and by peering through the pixels, you can still take a picture. It"s the holy grail of front-camera design.

As we"ve seen in explainers from Xiaomi, these under-display cameras work by thinning out the pixels above the display, either by reducing the number of pixels or by making the pixels smaller, which allows more light to reach the camera. In the area above the camera, manufacturers will have to strike a balance between a denser display with lower-quality camera results or better camera output in exchange for an uglier above-the-camera display.

ZTE"s official renders of the device claim the camera is completely invisible, which can"t be right. It"s standard practice to not make any attempt at a realistic-looking pixel display in these renders, but in this case, that"s a big deal, since the display should look slightly darker above the camera. With COVID cutting down everyone"s ability to travel, there isn"t much in the way of live footage of the phone, either. ZTE posted an official live video to Weibo that really goes out of its way to never linger on a close-up shot of the camera, which is highly suspicious given the camera is the phone"s only headline feature. The best footage we can find right now is a YouTube unboxing from AmazTech, which at least takes the time to scrutinize the sensor location. AmazTech doesn"t have the sharpest video quality on Earth, but it doesn"t seem like ZTE has a lot to hide: the camera is still hard to spot. I would still like a better look at the screen, particularly with lower brightness levels, but so far it looks amazing. Advertisement

Covering the fancy new camera tech is a 6.92-inch 2460×1080 OLED display. The base model phone has a Snapdragon 765G SoC, 6GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, a 4220mAh battery, and a bunch of other unremarkable specs. ZTE lists Chinese prices starting at ¥2198 ($321). Huawei gets all of the "banned in the USA" headlines, but ZTE isn"t welcome in the United States either. That means you shouldn"t expect much in the way of distribution.

Although Chinese manufacturers usually get the jump on new technology like this, everyone picks from the same parts bin. So you can expect to see under-display cameras from most major Android manufacturers in the next year or two. This also means we"re rocketing toward the age of the completely invisible camera, a privacy-nightmare world where any device with a screen could secretly be recording your every movement. We"ve already run into devices that can discretely include microphones, and last year Google got into hot water for shipping a device with an undisclosed microphone. Now we get to do this with cameras! Welcome to the future, I guess.

Finding the best monitor with webcam for your office setup can be a good idea if you"re regularly having to take Zoom calls or make online presentations (which is probably most people these days). Laptops almost always have a webcam built in, but most monitors still don"t. However, a built-in monitor webcam can save time and hassle, meaning that you can jump straight into a virtual call without having to worry about the set up of your camera and without needing to switch to another device.

Below, we"ve selected the best monitors with webcam based on our reviewers" experiences, on customer reviews and on the stated specs and features of each display. We"ve chosen a range of options, including some that offer good enough colour coverage and brightness for creative work as well as a good webcam (a lot of the best monitors with webcams tend to be more business-oriented). Monitors with webcams are still mostly FHD screens, but for higher resolution, we like Dell"s U3223QZ 4K video conferencing monitor, which we"ve placed at number two in our list. There"s also the Apple Studio Display.

If a webcam isn"t your main priority for a monitor, see our guides to the best 4K monitors, the best ultrawide monitors the best USB-C monitors. And if you"re after a tactile screen, we have a pick of the best touchscreen monitors. In the meantime, here"s our pick for the best monitor with webcam available today.

We"ve mentioned the lack of 4K monitors with webcams, but the new Dell Ultrasharp U3223QZ is an exception – and quite some exception it is. We"ve defined it as the best 4K monitor with webcam, but it"s really the only 4K webcam around. And although it stands out alone from the crowd for the 4K screen and webcam alone, it doesn"t stop there, offering a host of multitasking features, premium-built and great performance.

The Dell C2422HE could be the best monitor with webcam if you have a lot of video conferences. It has a 24-inch Full HD screen and it"s been certified for Microsoft Teams, with a dedicated Microsoft Teams button and an LED notifications indicator. The pop-up 5MP IR camera offers a sharp, clear image and the dual 5W integrated speakers deliver clear, vibrant sound. The noise-cancelling microphone is a nice addition to dim background noise for conferences. It also offers facial recognition through Windows Hello for security.

The C3422WE is a widescreen, curved version of the C2422HE above. It comes with most of the same features, with the same pop-up 5MP IR camera but a 34in curved WQHD screen. The curved screen is often a personal preference, some people like it and find it a more immersive experience that makes it easier to view the whole screen, but it is divisive.

The Center Stage feature uses artificial intelligence to keep you centred even if you move around while you"re on screen. There"s also a studio-quality mic array, and the A13 Bionic chip offers Dolby Atmos audio for sound that"s pretty impressive as far as built-in speakers go.

For a really wide screen, there"s this giant from Philips. Ultrawide monitors with webcams are a very rare breed, but if you have the desk space, the Philips Brilliance 499P9H is just the thing for a swathe of display complete with a webcam. It"s not ultrawide, it"s superwide; confusingly that"s an even wider option, with a 32:9 aspect ratio rather than 21:9, giving you the same screen space as having a pair of QHD displays side by side.

Ideally, you want a webcam that delivers 1080P resolution. 720P is about acceptable, but that extra resolution makes a real difference (except for when you"re reduced to a tiny portion of a gallery view). Stereo microphones are a definite plus, and if you have concerns about privacy, you may want to consider a pop-up webcam that you can put away when not in use, or at least one with a privacy screen that you can put down over the lens.

Under-display cameras are poised to be The Hot New Feature, following up on the similar success of the in-display fingerprint sensor. It almost seems like science fiction: You can"t see the camera, but it can see you. The technology promises to eliminate the last impediment in the all-screen phone dream. But how does it work, and when will you actually be able to buy a phone that has one?

According to Helander, there are two engineering approaches to designing under-display cameras: You either do everything you can to make the entire display as transparent as possible above the camera, or you essentially make tiny transparent holes in an otherwise opaque screen between the pixels.

In the first case, that means changing materials and rearranging things in the area above the camera. Certain metals in the various layers can be replaced by transparent conducting materials like indium tin oxide, and the structure of the display itself can be rearranged to reroute anything that might interfere with optimal transparency in that area. Anything that can"t ultimately be moved or made transparent can be made as small as possible.

There are a few limitations to this route: primarily brightness, uniformity, and resolution. Typically, OLED pixels are designed to be reflective on one side and transparent on the other, ensuring most of the light produced goes in one direction: toward you. Making the display transparent in one section interferes with that sort of design, and it can make the area the camera is in look distinctly different and less bright than the rest of the screen. Compensating for that effect by cranking brightness and calibrating differently in that tiny area can result in other long-term issues like burn-in around the transparent camera area. We"re also told that all the rerouting and transparency-increasing steps often mean accepting a lower display resolution in that particular spot — a handful of big pixels in a sea of smaller ones. This is allegedly the approach that ZTE is taking in devices like the Axon 20 5G.

The second method is a little different. Rather than making an entire stack of the display transparent across one area, you can carve out individual transparent "holes" between the pixels and rely on them to transmit light through the screen. You can do this in a few different ways, like cutting down on display resolution to carve out an area for one in every X number of pixels, or just shuffling and rerouting things to make regular patterned spaces.

As before, this means rerouting some components to ensure you have a clear line through the screen, but you don"t have to worry about the whole display stack being transparent, just specific spots at regular intervals. If your resolution is low enough, you can accommodate these extra holes without any loss, but at very high densities, it can also mean giving up some pixels and accepting a lower resolution. Importantly, though, this route means the individual pixels above the camera have the same individual brightness and performance characteristics of the pixels elsewhere on the display, so you shouldn"t have as many issues with uniformity. This second route is what we"re told Xiaomi is planning for its upcoming phones, and it sounds like it may work the best out of the possible solutions available right now.

Now, whichever route manufacturers take, under-display cameras won"t work quite the same as they did before. Either way, the camera is going to get a little less light with more stuff in the way, and there are other optical effects these designs have to fight. There are issues like reflection and diffraction from all the various materials, layers, and holes that the light travels through. These are problems that can"t be fully eliminated, but Helander tells us they can be compensated for in software and reduced by advances in material science and engineering. Some of these issues also result in "softer" looking images, mimicking some of the effects of the beauty filters so many people enjoy, so it isn"t all bad. Helander also claims that machine learning models can compensate for many of these issues pretty well.

This also opens a pretty big door for us in the future. Right now, most under-display prototypes just put the camera in the same place and extend the screen to cover it, but nothing is stopping us from using some of these solutions to make the entire display transparent and putting the camera wherever we like. Ultimately, we could move the camera down to the center of the screen, making it easier to keep the effect of eye contact when in video calls, or we could even toss several cameras under the screen in different places. Some day other optical sensors, like the infrared cameras used for face unlock systems, could also be moved under the screen. Eventually, we could do the same with desktop computer monitors, too.

Before this technology can replace the notch or the hole-punch cutout, it needs to be scaled up. And given the sort of engineering costs involved, Helander tells us that, counter-intuitively, we"ll see this technology roll out in the mid-range market first. Right now, sacrifices required when it comes to resolution and brightness mean this technology probably won"t be a good fit in the flagship space for a while, where customers expect the very best. Issues like a big gray square or circle in the screen at max brightness, a resolution drop in one corner, or an overall lower display resolution all won"t play at the thousand-dollar price point, but they"re more acceptable in a mid-range product, and the details of ZTE"s upcoming device lend further evidence to that argument.

In Helander"s estimation, it could be 2022 or 2023 before this technology becomes mainstream, engineering problems are solved, production ramps up, and the feature works its way up and down the market. In the meantime, most of us will have to make do with being able to actually see our camera in a bezel, notch, or hole-punch cutout.

If you"ve just started out in video, on-camera monitors may seem like a luxury. Experienced videographers will tell you otherwise. As well as enlarging the display to make recording easier, lots of on-camera monitors can also improve your camera"s video output. Whether you"re shooting on a cine camera, a mirrorless, or a DSLR, an external monitor is a necessity if you want to get serious about filmmaking.

You might think you don"t want to add weight to your setup or make it any bigger but an on-camera monitor is worth it. The extra big display means when you"re shooting you can see a more accurate, live representation of your footage. Should there be a speck of dust on your lens or sensor, you"ll be able to tell much easier on a 7-inch screen rather than a 3-inch screen.

Some of the more high-end on-camera monitors not only increase the size of your display but can improve your camera"s video functionality. For example, when shooting with a Panasonic Lumix S5(opens in new tab) and an Atomos Ninja V external recorder, you can shoot 12-bit RAW instead of 10-bit 4:2:2 with its internal recording option. On-camera monitors are also great additions if your camera lacks features such as a fully articulating screen such as the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K(opens in new tab).

Even if you have features turned on such as focus peaking, zebra lines, and false colors, an on-camera monitor lets you apply frame monitors which can reveal flickers that smaller monitors might not. They also enable you to proof content and show other people on set without having to cram around a small screen.

If your camera doesn"t support 4K, the Ninja V might be a bit overkill as you won"t make the most out of the features you"re paying for. If you"re just after a monitor so that you can view your video easier, the Atomos Shinobi would be a better option and it will save you money. Alternatively, if you"re shooting some serious projects and need something even bigger, the Atomos Shogun(opens in new tab) which appears later in this list sports a massive 7-inch screen, perfect for using with the best cinema cameras.

With the built-in camera control for various Canon, Sony, Panasonic, Blackmagic, and even Z Cam cinema cameras, this is a great option for anyone wanting a monitor that will help a filmmaker get the shot and be a very helpful visual aid in the composition process.

If you"re just looking for an external monitor and don"t need recording capabilities, the Atomos Shinobi delivers the display quality of the Atomos Ninja V but at a fraction of the price. It"s the perfect choice for vloggers who shoot with a camera with limited screen articulation such as the Sony A7 III(opens in new tab) or the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K(opens in new tab) which has a fixed display.

The Blackmagic Video Assist 5-inch is the only recorder in our round-up that can capture Blackmagic"s own RAW code video introduced on its Pocket Cinema Camera Range and is an ideal option for any editors who use Davinci Resolve to grade and edit.

Announced at IBC 2019(opens in new tab), it excited video enthusiasts given its potential to tap into the RAW potential of compatible Canon and Panasonic cameras - Blackmagic is in talks with both manufacturers to ensure Video Assist works well with their products.

This is the big brother of the original Shinobi, offering a much larger 7inch display - and billed as the movie directors and focus directors, but also as a great presentation screen for vloggers wanting to see clearly what they are recording. Its bright 2200-nit screen is the key attraction here - but it also does much more than just monitoring your image. With HDR capability - it offers built-in Log conversion, so you can see what your raw footage is likely to look like when edited, and you can even load up your own LUTs via the built-in SD card slot.

Putting a front-facing camera underneath the screen makes sense for a gaming phone like the RedMagic 7S Pro, as it gives you more screen real estate to play with.

Nubia"s new RedMagic 7S Pro could be one of the first US phones to get the most benefit out of an under-display camera. The international model of the gaming phone was revealed Tuesday, with a price tag of $729 (£669, roughly AU$1,160). It has a 16-megapixel front-facing camera hidden underneath its display and it runs on the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 chip. The phone is similar to a version released earlier in July in China. Putting the selfie camera under the display means you get more screen real estate for games.

These aren"t the best front-facing photos I"ve ever taken, but just the fact that they look OK and are able to pick up facial details from behind a screen is impressive.

I haven"t yet tested the phone"s rear cameras, which include a 64-megapixel main camera, an 8-megapixel ultrawide and a 2-megapixel depth sensor. It"s a similar setup to the $629

I"m here to tell you that under-display cameras are the future of phones, but that future is not quite here yet. At least based on my time in our Galaxy Z Fold 3 review in progress thus far.

The 7.6-inch display on the Galaxy Z Fold 3 uses under display camera technology that applies a minimum amount of pixels on top of the camera hole. The goal? To increase the viewable area and (nearly) banish the punch hole so you get a clean canvas when watching Netflix, playing games or enjoying other apps.

When you"re using the under-display camera or UDC for taking selfies, it will appear as a small hole toward the right top part of the screen and then disappear when you exit the camera app. It"s almost like magic. But just how good is this 4MP camera? Based on my testing, I"d say its decent — but not as good as I"d hoped.

First, let"s take these two selfies taken side-by-side outdoors, one shot with the 4MP under-display camera and the other the 10MP front camera on the Z Fold 3"s cover screen. With the under-display camera, my face and looks a bit blurry and the overall image has a haze to it. It looks and feels like a photo from a much older camera phone.

Meanwhile, the shot from the 10MP camera isn"t perfect, but my skin tone looks more accurate and you can make more detail out in my shirt and hair. And the background and grass look sharper too, from the grass to the fence.

Things look even worse for the Galaxy Z Fold 3"s under-display camera when I moved indoors. The UDC produced an image I"d expect from a laptop webcam, with smoothed over features and a fuzzy overall look. It"s not terrible, but it"s close.

The 10MP front camera produced much better results in that it looks more like a photo than a painting. Seriously, the detail in and around my eyes and my teeth just looks so much better. I would much rather trust this camera with selfies.

Kate captured a screenshot of our chat and as you can see I come okay, but there"s just not much definition. And this was with a ring light turned on in front of me.

Bottom line: The under-display camera on the Galaxy Z Fold 3 is a very intriguing innovation, but the image quality does not match up to the wow factor that having a disappearing camera provides.