An all-screen iPhone just took a step closer to reality with under-display camera push

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If you look at your current iPhone, whether that's the latest and greatest flagship iPhone 15 Pro Max or something a little more modest, like the iPhone 13, you're probably already wondering the same thing - when will Apple get rid of that ugly area where the camera lives? On older iPhones that's a notch that houses the Face ID magic and selfie camera, and on the iPhone 15 family of devices, it's where the same tech lives but within the funky Dynamic Island. But in future iPhones there might be no camera holes whatsoever, leaving Apple with an all-screen display to do whatever it wants with.

That's after a new report by The Elec claimed that Apple's Korean display partners have already started to develop under-display cameras that will allow Apple to ditch the pill+hole arrangement of even its very best iPhones. The report claims that LG Innotek is the company that is pushing the development of technology that would allow the camera to sit beneath the display while still being capable of capturing whatever it's looking at.

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There are already phones that have under-display cameras in the Android world, but the images taken by those cameras can be washed out at best. That happens because less light can reach the camera's sensor because, obviously enough, it's being blocked by the display. However, LG Innotek seems to have an answer for that in a new "freeform optic' lens system that helps to increase the amount of light that can be collected.

LG Display, part of the same LG group as LG Innotek, as you'd imagine, is also said to be working on the same technology. However, it could be some time before we see such technology come to an iPhone with Apple unlikely to give it the green light until it is convinced of the quality of the images captured by an under-display camera. Apple is already tipped to be reducing the size of the cutouts used for its current iPhone 15 camera system by putting the Face ID sensors under the display. That's touted to happen by the time the iPhone 17 Pro arrives in 2025, so there's still some time to wait for that, too.

Before then of course, we have the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro models that are expected to use the same system we're familiar with when they go on sale in September 2024, assuming Apple sticks to its tried and tested release schedule, of course.