Earlier this week, ZTE officially announced to launch the world’s first under-display camera smartphone called Axon 20 5G on September 1. Since then, the company has been teasing this handset with promos and renders. One of the firm’s executives has now revealed some tidbits regarding the development of this phone to the Chinese media.
Lu Qianhao, Director of Consumer Experience at ZTE told Chinese media (via MyDrivers) that they spent more than 20 months in R&D to give birth to ZTE Axon 20 5G. He admitted that under-display camera technology is extremely difficult, complex, and expensive to achieve.
Back in June, Brian Shen, Vice President of OPPO also made a similar statement. He mentioned the development phase as a “tortuous path”. And even asked people to not expect good quality images from the first-gen products. But he did say that one day, this tech will be perfected with incremental improvements.
It is rumored that OPPO is not satisfied with the picture quality of the under-display cameras yet even though they were the first to showcase it publicly in December 2019 at OPPO INNO DAY conference in Shenzhen, China.
On the other hand, Ni Fei, President of ZTE Mobile Devices said that they carried out a blind selfie camera test for Axon 20 5G and the participants did not find any issue with image quality.
Having said that, the upcoming ZTE Axon 20 5G is rumoured to feature Visionox OLED panel for the under-display camera solution. Earlier in July, news broke out that the display manufacturer had shipped $500 million worth of this type of panels to Huawei and Xiaomi.
Interestingly, the world’s first under-display camera smartphone will not be a flagship. According to TENAA, the Axon 20 5G will be powered by the mid-range Qualcomm Snapdragon 765G chipset. But due to that selfie camera, the phone may be priced higher than other normal 5G handsets with this very same silicon.
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