UNDER-SCREEN camera is going to be the next big thing in the smartphone market. Companies are working very hard to perfect in-display cameras because of the tremendous aesthetic upgrade that it brings to smartphones. Without a notch or a punch hole on top, smartphone screens will have no distractions up front, ensuring a true, full-screen visual experience.

ZTE will soon announce the world’s first commercial under-screen camera smartphone, the Axon 20 5G.

But Xiaomi didn’t want to miss out on the party as it decided to reveal its third-generation under-screen camera technology last week. The first didn’t exist outside of the lab and the second was shown off to the public but never made it into production.

There are no doubt all sorts of practical reasons for that. Among them seems to be the issue of pixel density. For reasons that ought to be pretty obvious, there’s a big question of how to maintain a consistent pixel density in the area of the screen that sits on top of the front-facing camera. Xiaomi claims to have solved the problem, however.

“The self-developed pixel arrangement used in Xiaomi’s third-generation under-display camera technology allows the screen to pass light through the gap area of sub-pixels, allowing each single pixel to retain a complete RGB subpixel layout without sacrificing pixel density,” it writes in a blog post.

Xiaomi says it has been able to effectively double the pixel density of competing technology, letting light through to the camera, without sacrificing the uniformity of the screen. As a result, the display area on top of the under-screen camera manages to achieve a similar level of pixel density, color accuracy, color gamut, and brightness as the rest of the OLED panel.

The company has also improved the OLED pixel driving circuit to improve the light transmittance above the camera. Finally, Xiaomi claims that its self-developed camera algorithm is capable of delivering the same image quality as traditional selfie shooters making its latest solution “almost perfect.”

It looks good in the side-by-side videos the company has released, but obviously it’s worth reserving judgement until mass production starts next year.(SD-Agencies)