Xiaomi has been showing off its under-display camera tech for the last year, but it has confirmed that it's ready to bring this tech to market in 2021. 

This is being touted as the next big thing for smartphones, meaning that you'll be able to get a display that's free from notches, indentations or holes, without the need for pop-ups or other mechanical workarounds.

Xiaomi says that the first generation of this technology never made it out of its labs. The second generation did and was introduced to the world in the middle of 2019 and resulted in a slightly dim patch in the display where the camera sits, a problem that Xiaomi says it has solved with its third-gen tech. 

"The self-developed pixel arrangement used in Xiaomi's 3rd 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," says Xiaomi in a blog post.  

"Compared with other common solutions on the market, Xiaomi has doubled the number of horizontal and vertical pixels, achieving the same pixel density above the camera as on the rest of the display area. Thus, the area above the integrated camera demonstrates the same brightness, color gamut and color accuracy as the rest of the display."

mi under display camera photo 2

 

Xiaomi is very much pitching this as a perfect solution, offering both the quality expected for your selfies, as well as uninterrupted display performance. Of course, we won't know if that's actually true until we see this in a production handset, and we'd guess that the Xiaomi Mi 11 would be the perfect phone for that, expected in early 2020. 

Xiaomi might not be the first to market with this technology however. ZTE has said that it's launching a phone on 1 September 2020 that will also have under-display camera tech in place. Rumours suggest that Samsung might follow suit in 2021.