Under-display cameras are finally becoming viable for mainstream phones

Under-display cameras (UDC) have been technically possible in smartphones since 2019, when ZTE shipped the first commercial phone with a selfie camera hidden beneath the screen. For most of the years since, the technology has been a compromise buyers tolerated rather than wanted: the patch of display sitting over the lens had to use a lower pixel density to let enough light through, which left a visible grid-like blur or discoloration on that part of the screen, and photos taken through it looked noticeably softer than a standard front camera. That trade-off is starting to close, and the place it's closing fastest is not flagship candy-bar phones — it's foldables.

Why Foldables Are Driving the Real Progress

Samsung has used under-display cameras across several generations of its Galaxy Z Fold line, and the improvement between early and recent generations is the clearest public evidence of how fast the underlying panel technology is moving. Early implementations had a UDC patch that was visibly identifiable at a glance, with washed-out color reproduction and a soft, low-contrast image quality. More recent generations narrow that visual gap significantly, though Samsung has been candid that image quality still lags behind a standard punch-hole camera enough that it held off putting a UDC on its top-tier Ultra devices, reserving the more visible compromise for the folding form factor where an interruption-free inner screen matters more to buyers.

That's the core trade-off driving adoption patterns: on a folding phone, the inner display is explicitly marketed as a tablet-like, distraction-free canvas, so eliminating a camera cutout carries more perceived value than it does on a standard phone, where a small hole-punch camera is already barely noticeable. Foldables are functioning as the technology's proving ground precisely because the audience buying them is more willing to accept a camera quality compromise in exchange for an uninterrupted screen.

What's Actually Changed at the Hardware Level

The improvements come from a few compounding advances rather than one breakthrough. Newer OLED panel designs use smaller, more transparent pixel structures over the camera zone, letting more light reach the sensor without needing as large a low-density patch. Sensor-side, computational photography has taken on more of the correction work — software-side deblurring and color correction, trained specifically on the diffraction pattern created by shooting through a display layer, now recovers a meaningful share of the detail and color accuracy that used to be lost outright. And a handful of Chinese Android manufacturers have reportedly been testing under-display implementations that also carry the sensor hardware needed for 3D facial recognition, a capability that has effectively been an Apple Face ID exclusive since 2017 because most Android phones rely on simpler 2D face unlock or in-display fingerprint sensors instead.

That last point matters more than it might first appear. 3D facial recognition requires more sensor real estate and processing than a basic camera, so packing that hardware under a display without a visible cutout has been considered significantly harder than under-display color photography alone. If that testing turns into a shipped product, it would be the first serious sign that under-display sensor technology can support security-grade biometrics, not just casual selfies.

What's Still Genuinely Unresolved

Even with the progress, buyers should not expect an under-display camera to match a standard front camera in 2026. Low-light performance in particular remains the harder problem to solve, since the fundamental issue — a display layer sitting between the world and the sensor, reducing the light that reaches it — doesn't fully go away no matter how good the pixel structure or the computational correction gets. Video calls in dim rooms and low-light selfies are where the gap between UDC and a standard camera is still the most visible, and no manufacturer has publicly claimed to have closed that specific gap.

What to Watch For

If you're evaluating a foldable or flagship phone in the next product cycle and camera quality on the inner or front display matters to you, look specifically for reviews that test video calls and low-light selfies rather than daylight photos, since that's where remaining UDC weaknesses concentrate. And if 3D facial recognition under a display ships in a commercial device this year, treat it as the signal that under-display sensor technology has crossed from a cosmetic feature into genuine hardware capability — that's a bigger technical milestone than another incremental jump in selfie sharpness.