Samsung to Introduce OLED-Powered Laptops With Under-Display Webcam

[Raevenlord]

Samsung this year aims to bring OLED panels in laptops closer to mainstream, with the company already announcing it would be scaling its OLED screens to serve the 13,3-16" diagonal-craving population with the best visual quality available. The company is apparently aiming to take this further by investing into under-display webcams, which would prevent machines from shipping with large top bezel designs engineered to accommodate them. It also skirts implementation of other, more exotic solutions such as the one found in the Huawei Matebook X Pro - where the webcam is located in a mechanical pop-up on the keyboard area, and mostly shows viewers the inside of your nostrils.

Samsung says that this under-display design should allow laptop makers to achieve up to 93 percent screen-to-body ratio for an immersive viewing experience. Do keep in mind that such a design was implemented only once in the industry in ZTE's Axon 20 smartphone, which incidentally featured diminished selfie camera and display quality due to it being under-display, which even led to resolution compromises on the area of the display that sits over the camera. The idea in ZTE's phone - and is the same for Samsung here - is that the segment of the OLED display that covers the camera will turn translucent whenever the optics are activated. In the ZTE phone, this resulted in clear quality compromises. We'll see if Samsung fares better. There is currently no time to market on such OLED panels, however.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[TheLostSwede]

If the first phones with under display front camera is anything to go by, this is going to be mostly useless.

 

[Yrd]

If the first phones with under display front camera is anything to go by, this is going to be mostly useless.

With no way to tape off the camera.

 

[TheLostSwede]

With no way to tape off the camera.

I was referring the the awful quality of under display cameras though. See:

The world’s first under-display selfie camera isn’t very good

ZTE’s Axon 20 5G is a better phone if you don’t care about selfies

www.theverge.com

 

[noel_fs]

With no way to tape off the camera.

you can just disable it in device manager

 

[Sasqui]

you can just disable it in device manager

Not if you're a conspiracy theory type

I think the best news is the OLED itself, lighter thinner and unmatched quality. Even if you're still afraid of burn-in.

Having the camera closer to the center of the screen would also make video chats more "personal" - you would be looking more at eachother than down from the camera.

 

[Batou1986]

While this looks nice I would never buy a laptop with bezels that thin, one wrong bump and your cracking the screen.

 

[Sasqui]

While this looks nice I would never buy a laptop with bezels that thin, one wrong bump and your cracking the screen.

I suspect they are using a flexible substrate. The iPhone 12 does too, but then they put glass on it as a protector, how ironic. Then again, smartphones are much more likely to get scratched, hence the glass.

 

[evernessince]

you can just disable it in device manager

That's not really a good safe guard. I would be surprised if enabling disabled cameras wasn't already part of the routine for malicious software / code.

Even if you aren't concerned about this yourself, you have to admit this technology makes it harder for those that do.

 

[voltage]

I wish they offered this in a 17"

 

[TheUn4seen]

OLED in a PC. Yay for people who only watch movies or play games, horrible for everyone else. My wife got a Thinkpad X1 Carbon with the ridiculously expensive OLED screen. It had Excel's interface permanently burned after three weeks, after three months the screen was, for all intents and purposes, unusable. She usually works for at least 10 hours a day so it might last longer for others, but I'm sure a lot of OLED panels with burned Facebook interface will land on landfills.
It's like with glossy screens, all-glass smartphones and such. They look beautiful on store shelves and turn out to be horrible when you actually use them, but we all know most people buy with their eyes with no input from the brain.

 

[R-T-B]

OLED in a PC. Yay for people who only watch movies or play games, horrible for everyone else. My wife got a Thinkpad X1 Carbon with the ridiculously expensive OLED screen. It had Excel's interface permanently burned after three weeks, after three months the screen was, for all intents and purposes, unusable. She usually works for at least 10 hours a day so it might last longer for others, but I'm sure a lot of OLED panels with burned Facebook interface will land on landfills.
It's like with glossy screens, all-glass smartphones and such. They look beautiful on store shelves and turn out to be horrible when you actually use them, but we all know most people buy with their eyes with no input from the brain.

Sounds like they used a Samsung OLED panel, and did not set up a screen saver. But yeah, point taken.

 

[Aquinus]

OLED in a PC. Yay for people who only watch movies or play games, horrible for everyone else. My wife got a Thinkpad X1 Carbon with the ridiculously expensive OLED screen. It had Excel's interface permanently burned after three weeks, after three months the screen was, for all intents and purposes, unusable. She usually works for at least 10 hours a day so it might last longer for others, but I'm sure a lot of OLED panels with burned Facebook interface will land on landfills.
It's like with glossy screens, all-glass smartphones and such. They look beautiful on store shelves and turn out to be horrible when you actually use them, but we all know most people buy with their eyes with no input from the brain.

This is my #1 complaint about my 5k displays. Image retention is god awful, but fortunately it's not permanent on LCDs and goes away over a relatively short period of time. Fortunately I haven't noticed anything like this on my iPhone 11 Pro Max yet, but I also don't tend to keep static images on the phone either. My computer on the other hand has static text on it all of the time because I write software and the 4 things open are typically a terminal, a browser, IntelliJ, and Slack. For that reason I'd probably never get an OLED screen for the computer.

 

[micropage7]

first is the cost of laptop, the cost of display, and you gonna make your wallet thinner to replace them

 

[Tartaros]

This is my #1 complaint about my 5k displays. Image retention is god awful, but fortunately it's not permanent on LCDs and goes away over a relatively short period of time.

At this point, we should wait for micro led to enter the mainstream in fairness unless it's something urgent or a good deal. I understand these displays are meant for laptops for media creators and maybe we will see some novelty expensive laptop to portrait how good and sleek it looks. I doubt it will gain any traction, it's just counterproductive for someone who wants to spend money on a gaming laptop and lower tiers just don't care about those sparkly extra colours at kidneys price.

 

[R0H1T]

Not if you're a conspiracy theory type

I think the best news is the OLED itself, lighter thinner and unmatched quality. Even if you're still afraid of burn-in.

Having the camera closer to the center of the screen would also make video chats more "personal" - you would be looking more at eachother than down from the camera.

You can always block the camera physically with something like a translucent tape.

 

[Caring1]

OLED powered?
So no cables or batteries hey.

 

[RandAlThor]

You can always block the camera physically with something like a translucent tape.

How it is blocking the camera if the tape is translucent .

 

[Bubster]

Under Display webcams in addition to full time snooping and spying by Social Media and search engines...I guess privacy is like...Gone with the Wind...Scary new world

 

[R0H1T]

How it is blocking the camera if the tape is translucent .

Depends, how much do you think needs to be hidden from prying eyes?

Something like a surgical tape is translucent & mostly opaque for all intents and purposes.

 

[micropage7]

Depends, how much do you think needs to be hidden from prying eyes?

Something like a surgical tape is translucent & mostly opaque for all intents and purposes.

and you end your monitor like this if you try to cover when it has under display cam

 

[R0H1T]

Not sure what you're saying, does that monitor have an OLED screen & an under display webcam?

 

[micropage7]

Not sure what you're saying, does that monitor have an OLED screen & an under display webcam?

no, i mean you gonna have annoying black dot on your screen if you cover the under display cam

 

[Shihab]

up to 93 percent screen-to-body ratio for an immersive viewing experience

And how on earth do laptops' top bezels reduce immersion? Because we need more of the irrelevent background to be indistinguishable from the completely unrelated content being displayed on-screen?

This idiotic crusade for thinner bezels keeps pushing the industry to even more stupid ideas every bloody year.

With no way to tape off the camera.

Came here to complain about this. -_-
I guess we'd better get used to breaking open new laptops out of the box. As if that isn't becoming increasingly difficult as well.

 

[Tartaros]

Under Display webcams in addition to full time snooping and spying by Social Media and search engines...I guess privacy is like...Gone with the Wind...Scary new world

It has been like that for 20 years now, why the fuck everyone panicks over that now?