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Xiaomi explains more about how its under-screen camera works
- vwyxp 7y agoWhat Western company did they steal this tech from?
- hereiskkb 7y agoCite sources and references for accusations. This isn't Facebook.
- majia 7y agoI think he’s being sarcastic.
- kmlx 7y agoi keep seeing this repeated constantly, almost exclusively by americans. i assume these are the last years of US hegemony.
- curiousgal 7y agoJudging by the attitudes displayed by Americans online, in general even though it could be a vocal minority, they are in so much debt to the smart American people that worked their butts off in the last century. If it weren't for the ground work laid by those brilliant scientists and politicians, the current attitude of "we rock, everyone else sucks and inferior" wouldn't have netted them much at all.
- hombre_fatal 7y agoWe're all living off the corpse of our ancestors.
- StavrosK 7y agoThis is very cool, but I wish marketing material told people that skin oils on their lends cause soft photos. Most people don't know to wipe the lens before taking a selfie, and the resulting photos look terrible.
- vwyxp 7y agoDon't know about Xuamaiu phones, but Pixel phones already warn you if the camera lens is dirty when you take a picture.
- baybal2 7y agoI found that rather annoying. How much time do you think they spent to write an algo to detect dirty lenses, and how much megacycles is spent to run it? So much for an annoying popup.
- nolok 7y ago> How much time do you think they spent to write an algo to detect dirty lenses, and how much megacycles is spent to run it? Compared to all the other things running when using the camera ? Nothing. Modern phone camera are like 50% cpu processing, both preview and capture. By comparison it's rather easy to figure out there is something in focus far below minimal distance. > So much for an annoying popup. The very vast majority of people prefer to be warned about it and correct, than figure out later that the photo they wanted is ruined.
- jdietrich 7y agoThe Pixel 2 has an extra 8-core processor purely for processing camera images. https://www.blog.google/products/pixel/pixel-visual-core-image-processing-and-machine-learning-pixel-2/ https://www.blog.google/products/pixel/pixel-visual-core-ima...
- nolok 7y agoSamsungs' as well
- tomglynch 7y agoThere's a video of it here: https://twitter.com/Xiaomi/status/1135447561202937857 https://twitter.com/Xiaomi/status/1135447561202937857
- gonesilent 7y agoLove how the AD copy is bigger vs the info graphic
- nolok 7y agoThe amount of tech turned from idea to actually manufactured in order to reach the holy grail of "full screen cover" is impressive. Ultrasonic fingerprint reader, under the screen camera and sensors, ... I am not sure I buy into the need for it on my cellphone; while I'm not like a lot of people from HN and actually enjoy a large phone and I was one of the first Note customers, lately I switched from a S9+ to a S10+ and I actually prefered the 9's screen compared to the infinity display with its hole (or concurrent and their notch), so I guess I need to wait until they finally figure out how to not need such tricks. But despite not feeling like I need / like it, I can't stop but be impressed at the tech and the speed at wich it is made. The first Galaxy S phone was barely ten years ago.
- baxtr 7y agoNo notch required might have been a great value prop when the iPhone X was introduced. But today? I have the feeling the notch has become a status symbol, that other phone manufacturers copy. EDIT: I don’t really the downvotes. Look at the “top 2019 android phones”, I counted 7 out of 15 having a notch... compare that with the ridicule and outrage when the X was introduced. https://www.wired.com/gallery/best-android-phones/ https://www.wired.com/gallery/best-android-phones/
- nolok 7y agoNot really. The top of the line android doesn't even really try to copy apple anymore. Some copy it because they can't just have the old "huge bezel at the top" design anymore, but eg samsung leaped above it with mini-bezel and then infinity-o, and xiaomi is going for under screen tech. And it is guaranteed that Apple will move to under-screen too once it's mature. The notch was a stop gap, no matter how used to it you think you might be, it's still a screen waster. Though with Apple's "we made that choice so it was right we won't go back", I wonder if they will ever go to an under the screen fingerprint sensor now that it works well. As great as face unlock is, they are many times where I want to unlock with my phone on my desk and fingerprint is superior, I was glad to recover it on my S10+ after 2 generations of missing it (scanner being backside).
- threeseed 7y agoApple won't move to under screen. There is way too much going on in their notch compared to their Android counterparts: https://www.iphonefaq.org/archives/976228 https://www.iphonefaq.org/archives/976228
- xattt 7y agoAn underscreen camera was an Apple patent circa 2005. I always thought that this was going to be the killer feature of the iPhone, but that never came to pass.
- comboy 7y agoI'm fascinated by your worldview. What happens to your status when new iPhone comes out without a notch? And do older smartphones that didn't have notch suddenly become status symbols?
- buboard 7y agoI wonder if the marketers who invented “full screen coverage” as a selling point are measuring the ROI of their invention
- nolok 7y agoIt's not a marketer thing, it's a people thing. TV went through the same thing, for the same reason. Practical or not, better or not, it looks and feel cooler to most, and that's enough for people to want it.
- solarkraft 7y agoI'm sure they are and the results are pretty impressive.
- Narretz 7y agoI really hope full screen coverage (and later foldable) phones will lead to smaller high end phones again. Even the Galaxy A class phones have become massive. And anecdotally, starting last year a lot of my friends that upgraded their phones have started to complain about the size. So I hope the mainstream has found its limit and the manufacturers will react.
- anbop 7y agoThis is going to be killer for establishing eye contact while videoconferencing. They just need to move it further down for that.
- mistercow 7y agoIt seems like the eye contact problem should be very easy to solve with a little CV and image manipulation. Particularly when you're on a phone or laptop, the adjustment needed is really tiny.
- petra 7y agoMounting the camera behind the screen could create eye-contact in video chats. That's the biggest difference between video chat and face-to-face conversations, and it creates low trust. And while xiaomi isn't the first to achieve that[1], xiaomi is a consumer company, and their price point is very affordable. So i hope they target this problem. they could be very successful, with good implications(environmental, social), hopefully. [1]https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/dve-launches-camera-embedded-eye-contact-telepresence-display-powered-by-microsoft-skype--vidyo--google--hangouts--zoom--cisco--polycom--and-blue-jeans-300351566.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/dve-launches-camera...
- iguy 7y agoDoes the screen have to be off where the camera is located? I haven't dug deep but the few videos I saw showed a black bar covering the camera while it was in use (and bright colors when not).
- ginko 7y agoI guess depending on how fast the camera is they could turn off the screen for a fraction of a second in between frames to take a picture. Not sure if that's feasible atm though.
- phire 7y agoThat could actually work. They already make low persistence OLED displays for use in VR, where the screen stays black for most of the frame and a bright bar of image rolls down the screen. The iPhone can already operate in this mode. I assume there is a display brightness penalty, but the image quality from the camera should be fine as long as it gets more than half the frame collecting light.
- baybal2 7y agoI think it's quite real with OLED. But even with screen on, if you use a specialised CCD with huge dynamic range, I think it's doable.
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- neilv 7y agoAll my smartphone/tablet/laptop cameras have labelmaker tape over them normally. I can't do that with an under-screen camera.
- astazangasta 7y agoYes! Thank you. I had the same thought, and then, "Well, no one else is paranoid enough to have this complaint."
- neilv 7y agoIt's been a not-unusual practice among privacy&security people for a long time. Starting around 20 years ago, hackers spying on people through their webcams was publicized (such as with the cDc's Back Orifice, IIRC). For a while, webcams sometimes had physical doors/shutters over them. More recently, there was a boost of awareness, when Zuckerberg was seen covering his own camera. But some companies presumably wanted you to be accustomed to their proprietary-ish videoconferencing, or to be accustomed to large wireless data plans, with network effects, and so they perhaps wanted to encourage front-camera use. Also, a door/shutter doesn't look sleek. (Next time I have a physical office, I'll probably hang a little basket outside it, to give away trimmings of black and white labelmaker tapes, for this camera-covering purpose.)
- 3jckd 7y agoI was trying to come up with a reasonable solution this. I wouldn't trust any software solution in the OS that "disables" the camera because even if hacking of the device is not possible, some sort of settings-phising might be. It seems that the only way to deal with this, would be to have a hardware switch that disables the camera, e.g. like iPhone's mute toggle.
- layoutIfNeeded 7y agoBut the OS can still get hacked to ignore the state of your toggle. E.g. the iPhone’s mute toggle doesn’t stop the alarm clock from using the phone speakers.
- CarVac 7y agoI remember a long time ago when I first heard about OLED displays I was promised that they could be effectively transparent, and this is the first time I've heard of this property actually being used.
- Roritharr 7y agoI wonder if this was also stolen from Samsung. Samsung was actively working on this in parallel to their folding displays. If both of these key technologies have been stolen from their R&D Department that would be a cause for major concern.
- seandougall 7y agoI would be very surprised if every major cell phone manufacturer in the world wasn’t working on this right now.
- felipelemos 7y agoThis is an accusation without any proof. Probably every major mobile phone manufacturer are working on this to solve the notch problem.
- Roritharr 7y agoIt's not an accusation, it's speculation. The theft of their foldable display technology is proven, so it's relevant to speculate where this is coming from. https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/30/tech/samsung-china-tech-theft/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/30/tech/samsung-china-tech-t...
- felipelemos 7y agoYou are right, but this source could be in the parent comment. Without it seems just a silly accusation.
- ksec 7y agoMy guess, it is actually using a Samsung OLED Panel. So it is not really stolen.
- sandworm101 7y agoSo the days of putting electrical tape over webcams are over? The black hats of the world rejoice. In all seriousness. I am very careful about webcams. I would never own a screen with such a hidden cam. And the emergence of this tech is a little unsettling as it defeats an effective and very practical security measure.
- usaphp 7y agoI never understood the reason behind covering a camera on a laptop. I mean, what exactly are you afraid of? Someone can film you sitting in from of a screen? A microphone would be a more dangerous threat in this case, no?
- dangwu 7y agoPeople do Other Things™ in front of their laptops... Imagine that you never did anything in a certain room of your house except sit quietly. Are you saying that you’re okay with anyone standing outside that room staring into it at anytime?
- hereiskkb 7y agoPrivacy. Simple as that.
- zulln 7y agoI would like to kill my microphone as well. The fact that I have no easy way of doing that is not an argument for not covering the web cam.
- knolax 7y agoI'm self conscious about my double chin. I don't want the cute guy working at the NSA to see that.
- sandworm101 7y agoI have a security badge for work. I dont want it photographed.
- alt_f4 7y ago
- Someone 7y agoThe end game could be to have millions of low quality (possibly single-pixel) cameras in your screen, with software combining the images into a single one from a location that can be (somewhat) controlled in software. IIRC, that’s what was proposed in Starfire, in 1992. (https://www.asktog.com/starfire/ https://www.asktog.com/starfire/), where they could also use those tiny cameras as a scanner (place a paper on top of the screen, and read out all the pinhole cameras)
- gnicholas 7y agoApple filed for patents on this circa 2001.
- inflatableDodo 7y agoPut a full screen sensor under the screen and scan pinholes while also playing video.
- walterbell 7y agoApple and Qualcomm have been exploring in-screen ultrasonic sensors for TouchID. https://www.tomsguide.com/us/apple-acoustic-pulse-fingerprint-sensor-patent,news-29334.html https://www.tomsguide.com/us/apple-acoustic-pulse-fingerprin...
- exabrial 7y agoCan Xiaomi be trusted? They make some stunning hardware.
- knolax 7y agoThey can be trusted until they gain enough market share. /s
- ilovepeppapig 7y agoI've installed LineageOS on my Xiaomi and it's great. Much faster, more stable and fewer bugs.
- lucb1e 7y agoSure, about as much as hardware from any other manufacturer. Maybe Fairphone might be more trustworthy than the rest because they care about the supply chain and are not that popular (hence they're less likely a target), but other than that, I don't think I'd trust any brand over another based on their country. They all get their parts from all over the planet and the software is also from all over the planet. I'd rather look at their profit model, which in Xiaomi's case is not just selling phones: they bake advertisements into the OS and are open about that being part of their profit model. Which would be fair enough if everyone understood how technology works and where your data goes, but very few people really understand that. For now, you can opt out and/or root or flash your phone, but this kind of thing usually becomes mandatory once the majority of people got used to it and there won't be a big outcry. Turning it on mandatory affects everyone, but turning it on as opt-out gives the media little to talk about; then, when most people have left it turned on anyway, it's a much smaller change to make it mandatory.
- knolax 7y agoDoes anyone know if they had to create a new type of OLED for the required level of transparency or if all OLEDs were already transparent? The source tweet had a graphic but it wasn't too clear.
- bane 7y agoMy guess is that whenever the camera is active, nothing can be displayed over it. In the demovideos I've seen, the display goes to black around where the camera is.
- pier25 7y agoI've been super impressed by Xiaomi's products. The other day I found a deal on a Mi A2 for only $150 and it feels like a $400-500 device. Plus it runs Android One, so pretty much stock Android. I'm a bit concerned about getting China spyware to be honest but AFAIK Xiaomi has been so far legit.
- 70122-_6 7y agoWhat did you think o' da fm-radio update, and when are we going to get an open-hardware collar 4 da 3.4mm headphone-jack?
- lucb1e 7y agoDo note that Xiaomi turns the OS itself into an adware platform. For now it's opt-out, but we all know how these things evolve. Having a Huawei myself, I am not opposed to Chinese phones or anything. I'm just hesitant about any ad-supported tech, or tech that you can't own. I wonder if they ever stop supporting rooting/flashing your phone to stop people from undermining their profit model. Which would be fair enough if you understand how technology works and where your data goes and still choose to buy it, but (percentage-wise) almost nobody understands it sufficiently to make that choice.
- Causality1 7y agoI hope all these future in-display cameras are within the status bar area as depicted and nobody gets the bright idea to put it dead center of the screen. I'm rather obsessive about display perfection and that little dot of shadow on a content area would be more than enough to drive me crazy.
- alanbernstein 7y agoI think that defeats the purpose? The main benefit that I see is she contact in video chat, where you'd want the camera pretty close to the center. If you don't get that, why bother at all?
- Causality1 7y agoSame reason for notches and glass backs and removing headphone jacks and curved screens: fashion. Smartphone sales are all about being trendy no matter how stupid the trend is.
- ksec 7y agoI wonder if FaceID will work underneath the OLED. Since I assume the OLED screen may distort the Dot Sensor. So assuming this will work, wouldn't all Smartphone be looking exactly alike? I am pretty sure Xiaomi, Huawei, Vivo, Oppo, will push this to sub $400 Price point two years after it appears. Assuming this becomes available in 2021, we are talking about by 2023/2024 every smartphone on the market will very much the same. I am going to assume Qualcomm / ARM CPU will improves up to the point CPU performance no longer matters. And everyone would be buying the same Sensor from Sony. It will literally be Apple's value ( Privacy ), Security ( FaceID ) and Software ( iOS ) that separate between iPhone and Android. The hardware could be mostly the same. But iPhone would cost double the price.
- skykooler 7y ago> I am going to assume Qualcomm / ARM CPU will improves up to the point CPU performance no longer matters. Unlikely. CPUs are hitting the limits of Moore's Law.
- nomel 7y agoWouldn’t there be artifacts (maybe diffraction) from a view through the OLED pattern?