Oppo’s invisible ‘under display’ camera just made notches and cutouts irrelevant

In the race to provide users with ever more screen real-estate, smartphone manufacturers have worked hard to make their selfie cameras as unobtrusive as possible, implementing solutions such as notches, pinholes and even mechanical pop-up cameras.

While many of these approaches are undoubtedly clever from a design standpoint, all of them can be seen as an engineering compromise – nobody truly wants a notch or pinhole cutout on their beautiful handset, but they'll take one if they have no other choice.

Well, it seems that compromise is about to become a thing of the past, with Oppo announcing that it has finally cracked the smartphone selfie camera dilemma, revealing a world-first look at its under-display camera technology in a video posted to Twitter.

As you can see, the video above shows an all-screen smartphone with no notches or cutouts of any kind (or even a pop-up camera), but which is still able to take selfies. In the video, a ring of light appears at the top of the phone's display which indicates where the invisible camera is placed.

The Chinese manufacturer has previously opted for pop-up selfie cameras in its Oppo Find X, Oppo F11 Pro and new Oppo Reno 5G, however, it goes without saying that a phone with no moving parts is preferable to one which could break down after extended use.

At present, Oppo has yet to reveal when we can expect its under-display camera tech to make its way into a consumer phone.

That said, the company has traditionally been known to fast-track its technological advancements and bring them to market quickly – so it's possible that we may have this tech in our hands sooner rather than later.