Finally, ZTE’s world-first smartphone with an under-display selfie camera is here! ZTE’s Axon 20 5G has come out of hiding and it’s worth a look today.

• Our friend David Imel has a great short video on the phone, the tech, and of course, some selfie samples.
• The selfie photos are pretty bad. 
• It may be a world first, but it comes in a distant second to the quality of selfies you’d expect from a new phone today.

Here’s where we’re at. 

The phone looks pretty solid:

Here’s an ultra close-up of the module area itself hiding under the OLED display:

(Take note: the module is less visible in real-life — here we can see it through the camera due to the Moiré effect of the pattern. David says it looks much better in person: “ZTE tries to hide this area by using default wallpapers that are dark near the top. In practice, this works very well. When viewing the phone with darker colors near the top of the screen, you probably won’t notice the camera at all. if you’re using a white background, it’s a bit more obvious.”)

The details:

• ZTE’s Axon 20 5G is now on sale for $449, complete with a full-screen display, no notch, punch-hole, no flip, pop-up, or oversized bezel hiding a camera.
• It’s a milestone in tech, with the selfie camera a 32MP shooter. 
• But the selfie camera isn’t very good. Images in good light have a smear to them, or a certain glow, akin to a bad beauty filter some phones insist on using out of the box.
• Images in lower light look closer to unusable:

• The fogging we see here is about expected: In order to let enough light through the display and into the selfie camera sensor, something has to be done. 
• In January this year, Xiaomi executive Lu Weibing talked about the tech issues, and noted that higher-quality screens with >400 pixels per square inch (ppi), used in most smartphones, reduce the amount of light getting to the sensor, meaning lower quality selfie camera quality. 
• The solution is to drop the pixel density in just the region used for the camera, which ZTE has done here, rather than downgrade the overall screen resolution, together with “a combination of organic and inorganic film for a small part of the display.”
• The results are enough for a first-gen mass-produced product — the first in-display fingerprint sensors were pretty bad, too. 
• The results are not enough for anyone who likes snapping a sharp, crisp selfie. Like, um, you’d expect in almost-2021.

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Stay bright,

Tristan Rayner, Senior Editor