Samsung’s Already Sick of the Punch-Hole Camera

Samsung’s Already Sick of the Punch-Hole Camera

They were hailed as the solution to the notch problem, but it seems punch-hole cameras have already outstayed their welcome.

VP of Samsung’s R&D group, Yang Byung-Duk, has said that the company is already moving on from punch-hole screens to phones with all-screen bodies. That doesn’t mean no more selfie cameras – it means that like the ultrasonic fingerprint scanner on the Galaxy S10, the camera would be underneath the screen.


The speaker would also be sub-screen, which is something we’ve already started to see in devices like the LG G8 ThinQ phone and the Sony A8F TV. Both devices use the display itself as a speaker, vibrating the screen to create sound.

That means Samsung’s next phone could potentially literally be entirely screen on the front side – no notches, holes, cutouts, bezels – just one giant, uninterrupted display.

Well, almost.

The new screen tech will apparently still need a very tiny hole for the camera, but according to TechRadar it’ll be “small enough to effectively be invisible.” Like the mic holes on the supposedly zero-port phones.

We’re already pretty spoilt in terms of screen-to-body ratios: the S10 is over 93% screen, and upcoming phones like Huawei’s strange square-screen handset have just one tiny sensor dimple on the front display.

While we wait for all-screen tech to happen, smartphone manufacturers have come up with some pretty ingenious disguises for the hole, including Oppo’s ingenious placement of the camera icon with the hole as the lens, and Samsung’s own plans to put a second screen over the top.

In the meantime, here’s how to hide the punch-hole camera on the Galaxy S10.


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