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Pop-up cameras – are they even reliable?




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Smartphones with a notch in their screens were a trend lately. Should it have been though? When notches were first introduced, they were thick and even after shrinking them to a water-drop form, they still looked ugly. Manufactures did their best with these notches; they changed the sizes, positions and even tried punching holes through the displays! None succeeded at offering what we wanted – a truly edgeless display.

Thankfully though, what should have had happened two years ago is finally happening and OnePlus has made it possible. The OnePlus 7 Pro is among the first phones to sport an edgeless AMOLED screen but how did OnePlus manage this? It’s simple; they just hid the front camera inside the phone using a pop-up mechanism. So now we have a phone with a cleaner design and a front camera that pops up, only when you need it!

But since pop-up cameras are new and have moving parts, there is bound to be some scepticism. Is the pop-up camera reliable? Will it break, or will it stop working after a while? If these questions are your questions, we might have the answers to them.

The OnePlus 7 Pro pop up camera looks quite impressive and OnePlus makes this happen using a stepper motor mechanism. A stepper mechanism is something most of us might have never heard of. Unlike other motors, a stepper motor can be controlled using software to give very precise instructions and motion. Such mechanism are typically used in high-tech robots and advanced engineering appliances due to its reliability and accuracy. A stepper motor can be quite large and fitting it on a phone must have been a challenge for OnePlus, but they managed to do this successfully.

The stepper motor mechanism on the OnePlus 7 Pro use coils to move the camera in and out of the phone. The camera itself is attached to a flexible ribbon, which keeps everything in its place when the selfie mode is activated. If you were wondering about its reliability, OnePlus claims that you can pop-up the front camera up to 3 lakh times! That’s literally 150 times a day, for 5 years straight. If that doesn’t convince you, they also have a 12-hour long video showing the camera extending and retracting in the phone for 11,799 times!

OnePlus has tried to make the pop-up camera durable in other ways too. There is a sealing layer around the camera to make it more dust and water resistant. While OnePlus does not have a standard IP rating, their promo video at the launch suggests that the OnePlus 7 Pro can handle dirt and water pretty well.

Our phones sometimes slip out of our hands plummeting to the ground and that is terrifying moment, no doubt. The front and the back of the OnePlus 7 Pro is made up of Corning Gorilla Glass, making it quite sturdy and shatterproof. But, what if the phone falls with its pop-up camera out? OnePlus has done something really smart it here. There is fall detection feature that quickly retracts the camera to prevent any damage, hopefully before the phone meets earth. If fact, even if someone tries to forcefully push the camera inside, the camera automatically retracts inside the phone because of this safety mechanism.

The OnePlus 7 Pro pop-up camera is a welcomed feature because we finally get this gorgeous, edge-to-edge high-resolution screen that supports HDR, does a 90Hz refresh rate and so much more. This changes the game entirely. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 processor, the triple camera setup and insane amounts of RAM are an icing on the cake. All of this makes the OnePlus 7 Pro one of the best premium smartphones you can buy right now.