Smartphone design is slowly dumping notches, hole punches, and other blemishes that cut into the display to make room for the front camera. Devices like the OnePlus 7 Pro have reached the final form of all-screen front designs thanks to a complicated, motorized pop-up camera, but it would be nice if we could do all-screen phones without all the moving parts. A possible solution is coming in the form of an under-display camera—a camera that sits behind the pixels of your display to take a selfie through the screen.

So far we've seen both Oppo and Xiaomi show off prototypes of this technology in blurry social media phones, but at Mobile World Congress Shanghai, Oppo showed off its prototype to the public for the first time. Engadget attended the show to see the device in person, and well, it looks like this first generation isn't the seamless all-screen camera solution we were hoping for.

With Oppo's prototype, you get a full screen design, but Engadget reports that the display over the camera "appears to be more pixellated" than the rest of the display. Oppo's solution involves making the display over top of the camera transparent with a transparent anode and a "redesigned pixel structure for improved light transmittance." This "redesigned pixel structure" is, well, less dense than the normal screen, so the image over it looks bad. In the pictures it looks like a semi-transparent notch.

Optical in-screen fingerprint readers seen on devices like the OnePlus 6T and 7 Pro work a lot like an under-screen front camera. Both place camera equipment behind the display and look through the pixels to gather an image. Optical fingerprint readers can look through the display while still being seamless and invisible, but they only need to do the basic work of identifying the ridges and valleys of a fingerprint by feeding the image into an algorithm. Producing an image with acceptable enough quality for your Instagram selfie is a much harder problem, and for now it seems like collecting enough light with the screen in the way is a major problem.

Oppo says it worked to maximize the size of the photoreceptor to gather as much light as possible and still needed to space out the pixels in order to gather enough light from behind the display. There is apparently a lot of software correction happening behind the scenes, too. Even after all of this work, the report from Engadget Chinese notes (through translation) that the image quality is "a little foggy" and "the brightness and color are somewhat unnatural."

For now, Oppo says it doesn't have any timeline on when the technology would hit mass production. At least we know what to look for now.

Listing image by Engdaget