Samsung Under-Display Camera Teased - But It's Not For Phones

Ahead of its Unpacked event today, where the company is widely expected to reveal the new Galaxy S21 lineup, Samsung has been spotted teasing something of a completely different nature. While today should be most (if not wholly) about mobile hardware, Samsung Display is teasing OLED notebooks with a webcam under the display. This, as you can imagine, will come with a lot of benefits – assuming, of course, that Samsung can actually make it work well enough to warrant putting the webcam behind the display in the first place.

After all, if Samsung has worked out how to effectively move the webcam behind the display, this essentially means that it can create a notebook display with very thin bezels. Indeed, a lot of the teaser – which was posted to Weibo by Samsung Display and later uploaded to YouTube – centers around the edge-to-edge display such technology would allow.

Samsung Display even has a name for this type of screen: Samsung Blade Bezel. The bezels in the teaser are super thin – even thinner than they are on some existing laptops that don't have a built-in webcam to begin with. It seems that Samsung is saying it can achieve a screen-to-body ratio of 93% with its Blade Bezel displays, which is certainly impressive.

The big question is if the Under-Panel Camera (as it's officially called) can work just as well as a webcam embedded into a bezel. That's an especially big question when you consider that 2020 put the spotlight back on our laptop webcams in a big way, and laptops that are launching with underperforming webcams or without a webcam at all are lambasted for it in this age of working from home.

Samsung also says in the teaser that its OLED notebook displays will be thinner and lighter than other displays, thereby making for a more portable notebook. That all sounds great, but we'll just have to see what Samsung shows off when it gives its Blade Bezel laptops and Under-Panel Camera a full reveal, so stay tuned for more.