Oh, the promise of under-screen front cameras! They will take the “all-screen” phone design to a whole new level, and there will be no need for anything to pop, slide, or turn over to take a selfie.

If you remember, Xiaomi was first to provide a prototype proof of concept for a selfie camera that is tucked n under the screen and removes the need for a notch or a punch-hole camera cutout. According to the company’s Vice President at the time, however, those high-res phone screens of today’s flagships are making the technology a challenge as they are blocking too much light, but the display industry is hard at work on overcoming the roadblocks. 

Huawei and Xiaomi under-screen camera patents

First under-screen selfie camera tech enters mass production for a mysterious phone

As Visionox just announced the first mass production of an under-display front camera solution, called InV See, a popular tipster reveals that the first phone that will carry a hidden selfie camera will be announced soon.

It also had to even out the difference in brightness, color gamut, and viewing angles between the transparent OLED screen film that is on top of the sensor and the rest of the screen so the area doesn’t sit there like a patch, or you might just as well have a punch hole there.

Where does that leave Samsung, though, its 1440p QHD+ displays on the flagship S and Note lines?

Samsung Galaxy S21 (S30) and under-display selfie cameras

Is someone can pull this off, it’s Samsung, the near-monopoly on OLED displays, including transparent ones and whatnot. In fact, Samsung has had a patent on a phone with under-display camera since last April, and that term is exactly what it says on the tin.

More over, Korean media has already reported how Samsung intends to solve the light passing problem by ordering the so-called HIAA2 (for hole-in-active-area) screen panels. Don’t let the “hole” part fool you, as the display tech that brought along the S10 and Note 10 punch hole designs is denoted as HIAA1, while HIAA2 is its logical development. Samsung has reportedly employed the precise laser cutting technique that it has exclusivity over for OLED panels and which makes the front camera holes in the S20 series screens so compact. In HIAA2, however, it has reportedly covered the “hole” with a transparent display layer that can be active and still let more light shine through.

This sounds a whole lot like what Visionox has already done, so we can’t wait to see it demonstrated in practice, and can’t help but wonder on which Samsung phone it will be tested first.