ZTE Axon 20 5G teardown shows how the world’s first under-display selfie camera works

The quest to banish the notch from modern smartphone design has resulted in some pretty clever innovations, the latest of which happens to be the under-display selfie cam on the ZTE Axon 20 5G.

The 32-megapixel camera hiding underneath the screen didn’t quite impress us in our review of the device earlier this month, but it is a worthy sidestep to the hole punch or the pop-up selfie cam we’ve seen in past devices. Now, a new teardown video from YouTuber JerryRigEverything gives us a closer look at how exactly the Axon 20’s under-display camera works.

Beyond being just a generally insightful breakdown of the various components of a modern smartphone, the Axon 20 teardown shows us how ZTE is actually using two screens stacked on top of one another (a small, square, and low-resolution one on top of the selfie cam and the OLED top panel) to let the under-display camera peer out toward the user from beneath the top layer display.

It’s a first-gen device, but it’s undoubtedly a signal of where phone design will go in the future, as companies aim to preserve the edge-to-edge display without compromising on notches and cutouts for things like selfie cams and fingerprint scanners.