Forgotten Future Tech: What Happened?

Samsung has been trying to make its smartphone’s front selfie camera as inconspicuous as possible.

And in August 2021, Samsung launched the Galaxy Z Fold 3, its first smartphone with built-in under-display camera (UDC) technology.

The UDC camera was located at the top center of the Fold 3’s foldable display, and the resolution was 4 million pixels. It had lower performance than the selfie cameras built into other products, so it could only be used for video calls or simple selfies.

While the existing selfie camera had a hole in the display, which hindered immersion in the screen, the UDC camera is an under-display camera, meaning it is literally hidden under the display, so it has the advantage of providing excellent screen immersion, and has been praised as the smartphone camera of the future.

But as of 2025, this technology will not be found on virtually any Galaxy phone.

Why has the selfie camera technology of the future disappeared?

According to American IT media Sam Mobile, the cause of the failure is determined to be technical.

First, hiding the camera sensor under the display requires that the sensor receive more light, and to do so, the pixel size of the display must be increased to allow more light to pass through.

As a result, the resolution of the display covering the UDC portion is bound to be lowered.

Additionally, a display grid area inevitably exists, and this grid interferes with image quality or brightness.

Therefore, UDC cameras cannot avoid the problem of very poor shooting results.

In contrast, existing ‘punch hole’ or ‘notch’ type selfie cameras have lower costs and better image quality.

To summarize, UDC cameras are more expensive than existing selfie cameras, but have a very frustrating problem with lower performance.

Fortunately, in the case of a foldable phone, there are two selfie cameras (one is a regular selfie camera and one is a UDC camera), which compensates to some extent for the problem of the poor performance of the UDC camera. However, it was difficult for Samsung to continue to use such an ambiguous camera, so they ended up dropping the UDC from the Z Fold 7.

Unfortunately, it seems almost impossible to see the technology that was rejected in the Z Fold in a regular bar-type smartphone.

This is why UDC was praised as a future Galaxy technology, but is now a lost technology.

Beta News Reporter Kim Seong-wook (betapress@betanews.net)