In-Display fingerprint sensors to pop-up selfie cameras, we’ve seen phone manufacturers take creative approaches to achieving the highest possible screen-to-body ratio ratio ratio.

Zte Axon 20 5G is the world’s first phone to integrate its front-facing camera underneath the screen.

If the world were perfect, the camera would just magically exist under the display without compromising image quality on either end of either end.

Axon 20 5G is one of the biggest smartphones I’ve ever seen. The 90hz OLED panel is a massive 6.92 inches diagonal. The screen generally looks pretty good beyond some rough off-angle color shifting.

The Axon 20 5G smartphone has a huge’chin’ bezel at the bottom. It does n’t look good is the huge bezel that does not look good even though it would have been considered extraordinarily slim just a few years ago.

The under-display integration is extremely noticeable on light backgrounds. There’s a square patch of the screen that exhibits a clear dithering effect, making it appear much lower resolution than the rest of the panel.

Zte’s default software uses a black background for the top part of the screen where status and notification icons are displayed. But really, what are we even doing here?.

The above images show how visible the camera is on colorful, white, and black backgrounds. The images show the camera’s work on colorful and white backgrounds.

The camera’s technical achievement is a bad selfie camera. It involves new types of transparent materials, pixel filters, and demosaicing algorithms to make sense of the light that hits the camera.

Axon 20 5G’s selfie camera takes fuzzy, soft photos with weak colors and blown-out highlights. In good light, the camera takes photos with a blown-out highlights.

Axon 20 5G photo was taken with the portrait mode and smoothing filters turned off. Just to be clear, the 20 5G picture was taken.

I turned off the pixel 5’s night mode here to make it more of a fair fight, and it still crushed the Axon 20 5G.

Under-display selfie camera is merely functional, and that’s being generous. It can capture images through the screen, but you probably would n’t want anyone else to see them.

The Axon 20 5G has a huge footprint but is slim at just under 8mm thick. Zte has included a reasonably large 4,220mah battery inside. The processor is a Snapdragon 765g with an integrated 5G modem.

There’s a 64-megapixel main camera and a 16-megapixel ultrawide ultrawide, along with 2-megapixel macro and depth sensors that you can probably ignore. The main areas where ZTE has cut corners are its mediocre haptics system and an unimpressive downward-firing speaker.