Under-Display Cameras Are (Almost) Here — Is the Notch Finally Dying?

Remember the Axon 20? ZTE shipped it last year as the first phone with a camera literally buried under the screen, and reviewers were… polite about it. The concept was cool, the execution was rough — that patch of display sitting over the lens was visibly duller and grainier than the rest of the panel, which is a tough sell when the whole pitch is “you won’t even notice it’s there.”

Word is ZTE isn’t giving up. The Axon 30 is set to be unveiled on July 22 and go on sale July 27, and it’s carrying a second-generation version of that under-display camera tech. The promise this time is a truly invisible selfie camera — no notch, no punch-hole, no dimmed rectangle giving away the game. If they’ve actually closed the gap on pixel density and transparency over the sensor, this could be the first under-display camera phone that doesn’t feel like a compromise.

I’ll believe the “no visible artifact at all” claim when I’ve seen it in a bright room with something white on screen, because that’s where the first generation fell apart. Uniform coverage across a whole display sounds simple until you remember the camera underneath still needs light to reach it, which means the pixels above it can’t be packed as densely as the rest of the panel. That’s the core engineering problem here, and it’s not one you solve with software tricks alone — though I’d bet ZTE is doing plenty of processing to smooth over whatever seam remains.

Why this matters beyond ZTE’s spec sheet: the punch-hole camera has become the default look of a 2021 flagship, and it’s very much a compromise everyone accepted because the alternative — a big fat notch — was worse. Nobody actually wants a hole in their screen. Samsung has reportedly been experimenting with under-display cameras for its foldables, where the whole point of the device is an uninterrupted screen, and Apple’s rumor mill loves nothing more than speculating about the iPhone’s eventual notch-free future. If a company with ZTE’s resources can get this right on a mass-market phone, it puts real pressure on the big two to stop treating it as a someday feature.

The honest caveat: second-generation attempts at hard display problems (foldable creases, in-display fingerprint readers) tend to get meaningfully better without fully solving the underlying tradeoff on the first try. My money is that the Axon 30’s under-display camera will be a genuine step up — closer to invisible in normal use, still slightly detectable if you go looking for it under the right lighting. That’s not nothing. Going from “obviously a camera window” to “you’d have to know where to look” is the kind of incremental win that eventually adds up to the real thing.

We’ll know more in a few days once ZTE actually shows the phone off. If the display quality over the camera holds up to real scrutiny, this is worth watching — not because ZTE is about to out-market Samsung or Apple, but because somebody has to prove the tech works at scale before the companies that actually move the needle on notch-free phones will bother shipping it themselves.