OnePlus Seemingly Found A New Way To Hide The Selfie Camera

Karamchand Rameshwar - Feb 12, 2021

This might be OnePlus' next solution to achieve the full-screen display design, but it is unlikely to feature on the OnePlus 9 series.

One of the long-term goals that almost every smartphone maker wants to achieve is the ability to hide the selfie camera, while still being able to maintain the highest image quality. There have been many designs that have been put forward in the past few years. Two of the most common solutions are: pop-up camera and under-display camera. Both of these options have certain advantages and disadvantages, both of which have been implemented on current smartphones.

Oneplus Hide Selfie Camera — OnePlus might have just found a new way to hide the selfie camera.

Recently, OnePlus has filed a new patent showing that the company has come up with another way to hide the selfie camera while maintaining image quality. The company appears to be developing a camera sensor that can fit on the edge of a smartphone's screen, which means minimizing the area that the selfie camera uses on the front.

Specifically, LetsGoDigital posted a document submitted by OnePlus to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). This 23-page document describes how the brand uses OLED screens on smartphones, and one of the advantages of using this is to place the selfie camera into the top bezel, covered with a "transparent cover plate".

Oneplus Hide Selfie Camera 2 — Sadly, this design is unlikely to debut with the upcoming OnePlus 9 series.

Looking at the images in the patent, it is clear that the new design will help OnePlus achieves a full-screen display while still allowing the selfie camera to be able to deliver a similar quality to traditional cameras. This is a somewhat more aggressive solution than the under-display selfie camera because as we already know the world's first smartphone with an under-display selfie camera, ZTE Axon 20 5G, has certain disadvantages and the selfie image quality is largely dependent on image processing algorithms. This has prevented the widespread commercialization of the under-display selfie camera.

For now, OnePlus' new solution is only on paper. We can't say yet whether OnePlus is serious about developing and commercializing this new design, and we can be sure that this design will not appear on the OnePlus 9 series, which is set to be released in the near future. The upcoming OnePlus smartphones will continue to use the punch-hole design like many other products on the market.