There are already a few handsets on the market with pop-up cameras. Manufacturers are using them to eliminate notches and holes for truly edge-to-edge displays. Samsung had a slightly different idea with the Galaxy A80. It created a sliding, rotating mechanism for the camera. So there’s just one single camera system on the device that rotates to let you take selfies as well.

Have you ever wondered how Samsung has made this happen? A video of a disassembled Galaxy A80 shows us how cleverly Samsung has engineered the entire mechanism. It only uses one motor to both raise up the slider and rotate the camera.

Samsung’s clever engineering is on display in this Galaxy A80 video

The Galaxy A80’s triple camera setup has a 48-megapixel primary sensor, an 8-megapixel ultra-wide sensor, and a 5-megapixel depth sensor. It can rotate 180 degrees so the entire setup can also be used for selfies and video calls. Samsung has rightly been highlighting this prominently in marketing materials for the Galaxy A80.

The video first posted on Weibo shows how the motor first raises the slider out of its housing and then continues to push it further to rotate the camera. This shows that the mechanism Samsung is using for this rather unique idea is not too different or more complicated compared to a normal pop-up camera. It’s just extracting a little bit more out of the same hardware.

Samsung has even built in a fail-safe into the mechanism in the event of a malfunction. The camera rotates even if the pressure in only exerted on one side. This means that even if there’s a hardware defect on one side, the camera would still rotate. Impressed? We certainly are!

This is the mechanical structure of the Galaxy A80 camera, which is very complicated but takes up space.

Video from a Chinese Samsung engineer pic.twitter.com/YTdLfyqIFI — Ice universe (@UniverseIce) July 3, 2019