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00:00Hey, what's up? I'm KBHD here, and new phone. This is the ZTE Axon 20 5G. So you might have
00:09heard of this phone already, but also probably not. It's a fairly standard, newish, mid-grade
00:14phone, and looking at it, you might not notice anything super different. It's a big phone,
00:19of course. It does have this orange faux leather finish, quad cameras on the back, pretty big
00:24display. It doesn't look like anything too crazy we haven't seen before. Well, except
00:30one thing. This phone does have one thing we've never seen before in any other phone.
00:36It's actually up here at the top. You can kind of catch that, maybe? How about if we
00:40zoom in a little bit? Maybe you can see it a little better now. Or if we switch to a
00:45macro camera, you can kind of see it. Ah, there it is. Now you can see what I'm talking
00:50about. So this phone has the world's first under-display selfie camera. If we weren't
00:56in the middle of a global pandemic, I would love to do a video going out to people on
01:00the street and handing them this phone and saying, you notice anything different about
01:03this screen? Because I just feel like almost no one would actually pick up on it, because
01:08if you're not looking for it, it's almost invisible. But the second you notice it, you
01:14can't unnotice it. But we all knew this was coming. We've seen multiple parts of smartphones
01:18work towards this perfect all-screen phone thing for a while now. We saw the fingerprint
01:24reader go from the button to underneath the display. We even saw speakers on some phones
01:29go from above the display to right behind it, vibrating through the glass. So the last
01:34thing left, which is also the hardest thing, has been the camera. So our eye has gotten
01:39kind of used to all these notches and cutouts and hole punches in almost every new smartphone
01:44display these days, somewhere around the top, either in the middle or the corner. That's
01:48just a cutout, a hole in the screen you're going to have to have for the selfie camera.
01:53And there were other methods like pop-up cameras of different sizes and shapes. And while they
01:57technically did help achieve the goal of the seamless front display thing, and I happen
02:02to really like them for the security benefit of blocking the selfie camera when it's not
02:06in use, it was a loss in pretty much every other category to the manufacturer. It's a
02:11moving part in a phone which introduces higher probability of a failure point. It's worse
02:16and more difficult for waterproofing. It costs more. It takes up more space in the phone.
02:21So I liked them, but they've been kind of a workaround the whole time. So this was the
02:26inevitable thing, the new technology that would allow us to put the camera behind the
02:30display. And now that I've actually used it and looked at it, I can see why no one else
02:36has shipped it yet. So first of all, it's not a super high-end display. It's a nice
02:40screen, but it's not super bright. It's a 6.9-inch, pretty big OLED at 1080p and 90
02:46Hertz. Fine. It's a $400 to $500 phone. But right up there at the top, you can see there's
02:51something a little different going on. And when you really look for it, well, it's really
02:56obvious. So let's get technical for a second to explain what's actually happening here.
03:00There are a few things necessary to make this happen. You have the 32 megapixel camera itself
03:04back there inside the phone. Then you have basically a notch cutout in the display, but
03:10the display itself continues over this notch in essentially half the pixel density. So
03:15720p equivalent resolution with smaller pixels. So there's actually space between the pixels
03:22for the camera to see through. And then when you actually open the selfie camera and it's
03:26on, there's a driver manipulating those remaining pixels to make them semi-transparent. And
03:31lastly, there's literally a defogging algorithm running to help the camera software figure
03:37out what's behind those semi-transparent pixels. Then it merges it all together into
03:42one image. And that image is not great. It's impressive that it works, of course, but the
03:49selfies are soft, like charm and soft. They look like the lens maybe had like some fingerprints
03:55smeared over it or something, but no, this is the way it looks. This is the image the
03:59camera produces. Now, how much of that is due to the fact that this is a $400 ZTE phone
04:05selfie camera versus the fact that it's a brand new, one of a kind selfie camera technology?
04:14Hard to say, but I mean, this is like literal best case world-class lighting situation and
04:20this is how it looks. So it's clear that there's a bit of an image quality trade off here.
04:25Most of the noticeably bad parts of these selfies is in the highlights. So like anytime
04:28there's bright light or something where a lot of light should be shining through the
04:32semi-transparent pixels, well, you can start to see the semi-transparent pixels that aren't
04:37quite disappearing and kind of add a haste to everything. And you can even pull the white
04:41notification shade over the selfie camera while the video is recording and see pretty
04:46much all of those pixels light up, which is crazy. The trade-off is real, but if that's
04:50the trade-off just to hide the camera, then the real question is how hidden is the camera?
04:55And it's a different answer for different, even I'm looking at it now, it's different
04:59in different situations. So when the camera is off and you have a dark image or something
05:04sort of dark happening at the top of the display, it's impressively hidden. Like it's actually
05:09pretty good. And if you're, if you're looking for it, you'll see it. But most of the time
05:13you're looking at the display head on at other stuff and it's not distracting. It's kind
05:18of like the notch or the hole punch camera. It just disappears to your eye after a while,
05:22but even more since the image goes right over the notch, I think it looks best in this case.
05:28But what I noticed is the lighter the pixels or the brighter the UI, the more jarring those
05:33pixels get. And because now the half resolution and all the gaps between the pixels are way
05:38more contrasted and obvious here. So whether you're looking at it straight or at an angle,
05:44if stuff is bright, it's going to be visible. Like this is, you can see here what it looks
05:48like when I pull down the notification shade over it, you can see this is maybe worst case
05:52scenario, but like the pixel by pixel row lag and the, the pixelation of everything
05:57happening here. So yeah, it's clearly nowhere near perfect, but for a first version, it
06:03feels about right. You know, for as much as we talk about other companies like the, the
06:07Samsung's and Apple's of the world, they would never ship this. And so we need companies
06:12like ZTE to be taken that tech risk and to be putting this stuff out there to get that
06:18ball rolling. Cause now we actually have something to work with and judge the quality of a new
06:22tech on. This is, this is really interesting stuff. So now my big thought while testing
06:25this is how much better can it get and will it actually get better quickly? Cause when
06:32you think about it, all these other under display technologies that we've been working
06:36with with smartphones for the last few years started off bad and then got on this curve
06:41getting pretty good quickly. The under display speakers started off bad today. They are slightly
06:47quieter and slightly more muffled than a regular speaker, but they're pretty close. They're
06:52pretty close. The under display fingerprint readers again, started off slow, but they're
06:56close now. They're just slightly slower and slightly less reliable than the old gold standard
07:02touch ID button. So it's no surprise that the first underscreen selfie camera is bad,
07:08but how long before it's only a tiny bit softer and hazier than a normal selfie camera and
07:14how fast does it get good? I actually got to speak briefly with some of the people who
07:17are literally working on this and they're already working on future generations of this
07:22tech that we'll see better in later phones. And they are very confident, confident that
07:28they can hide this better with better pixel matching and better lines of resolution. But
07:33again, that's the other half is how good will the picture quality look. But here's another
07:37question. What does this mean for privacy? Like if this technology gets really good,
07:44what does this mean for like how screens of the future will look? Like my initial thought
07:48was, Oh, now if we don't know where the selfie camera is in a phone, we won't really know
07:53where to look when taking a selfie. Like, well, we look at the side or the corner or
07:57maybe it's in the middle someday, but to be honest, you'd probably just correct the way
08:02the eyes look with software. FaceTime already does this. Surface Pro X already does this.
08:07So that's, that's not even new, but does that mean laptops of the future? We'll be able
08:11to put the selfie camera anywhere, maybe further from the edge in the middle. And can they
08:17be on any time? Like if I don't have an indicator of any type, it could just be on all the time.
08:25Like imagine a hotel room TV with a camera behind it. That's terrifying. So that's definitely
08:32something I want to be keeping an eye on. I think the next logical step when this stuff
08:36starts to happen more often is to add an indicator light in the software somewhere so that we
08:41know when the camera's on like, like iOS did. So there's less privacy concerns and I can
08:46feel as comfortable at least as I did with those pop-up selfie cameras.
08:50But let me know what you think of this whole idea of putting the camera behind the display.
08:54I was originally going to ask like, do you think it's worth it? Do you think hiding the
08:58camera is worth the worst image quality? But I think in this first one, it's, it's pretty
09:02clear. No, it's not worth the trade-off. But my question to you is in the future, if this
09:08gets really good, do you actually even want your, your display to be hidden? Do you really
09:12want that full screen, beautiful phone at the expense of not knowing where the camera
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