Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “OnePlus Concept One Phone: Disappearing Cameras?”.
Hey, what’s up guys, i’m kbhd here and, as you can already tell, i am out here in las vegas for ces 2020 and there’s actually some good stuff here already as you’ve seen from my tweets. But i want to share something cool with you. While i’m out shooting some of the other good stuff, so oneplus is here with a concept phone, so they’re calling this the oneplus concept one and it’s in partnership with mclaren. They are not planning to sell this exact phone as it exists here, and they don’t have a date for when this tech could end up in a phone potentially but they’re showing it off like this is pretty much classic ces.
It’S a concept of something cool in tech that you might not ever sell, but if you do, then that would be cool, but what better time to show off something and make a nice little wave of press, so the oneplus concept, one under the hood. It’S essentially a oneplus 7t pro and if you dig around in the settings it says it’s a different, build number in the software and a slightly different model number. But you can see what we’re talking about here and then with some more mclaren themed stuff going on the papaya orange leather and stitching the gold colored metal on the rails instead of the normal black.
But for the main piece. The main reason why this is a concept is the disappearing and reappearing cameras on the back. It’S pretty cool, so all right.
What is actually happening here so for the glass in the back of the phone oneplus has taken the electrochromatic glass tech that we’ve seen in the sun, roofs of some supercars, specifically some mclarens, and actually show this in the video of the quirks and features of the Mclaren gt they have taken that tech and shrunk. It all the way down into the thinness and the form factor of the glass on the back of the foam. So the way electrochromatic glass works is this shade is created when electric current is passed through it.
So there are multiple layers of glass here and getting all that glass over the back to be thin enough to work on a smartphone, but still achieve this effect is technically really impressive and it took them. They told me 18 months of work already to get it to this point, so i can’t imagine it’s easy now. If you look closely or at the right angles, you can still actually kind of see the camera lenses here and there through the glass. So it’s not completely 100 opaque, it’s more like 90, something percent to me.
It seems, but it’s pretty clearly better looking when it’s darker, it’s overall sleeker. When that shade is closed and to me it just makes the phone look better. It looks cleaner that way and then open up the camera app and 0.7 seconds later. You’Ve got yourself a working camera, that’s totally see-through, and it almost makes this like animated, looking cross-dissolve sort of effect when the camera app opens, which is neat.
So i was having my fun opening and closing it turning it on and off seeing it sort of hide the camera and reappear but bonus feature for my fellow video nerds. It can also act as nd, so if you’re outdoors or in a bright environment, you can actually go into pro mode in the camera app and up in the corner on the concept 1. You have this nd button and if you press that the shade will give you three stops of nd from this electrochromatic glass kind of like sunglasses to your camera, as you’ve probably heard it called uh, which can be really useful in video. If you don’t want to mess with shutter speed to lower your exposure, so you can actually see it working here, as the iso goes up and down from 320 to 1250, as i turn it on and off. So it’s definitely really effective. Now it’s not variable nd or anything crazy like that, it’s just basically a yes or no to one level of nd, but hey three stops of physical nd built into a camera phone. I mean! That’S, that’s not something! We’Ve seen before! That’S why it’s so impressive! That’S something i’d expect from like a red hydrogen one or something like that, but obviously that didn’t happen so kind of cool to see it here so selling. All this in phones right now would be extremely expensive, and that’s my main guess for why this is a concept now and not a feature of a phone that they’re going to sell.
But that being said, it’s something they’re going to continue to work on and hey. Maybe, as phones get more and more cameras and get uglier and uglier weirder looking camera bumps, this becomes something that actually makes a little more sense. You know make the phone a little bit thicker flatten out the camera glass on the back, and you can hide exactly how many cameras you have and put as many as you want in there and the design doesn’t have to get any more weird. So if you look at it that way, it’s kind of this forward-thinking move where, if you imagine maybe like a samsung galaxy s 15 or you know some phone in the future with like a dozen cameras, you never have to see all those ugly circles on the Back, if you have this electrochromatic glass, then you can just put as many cameras in the smartphone as you want and it’ll always look sleek on the back.
So i thought this was fascinating. Either way, that’s it for this one. Just a quick, hands-on and a first look but definitely be sure to follow on twitter and get subscribed of course already.
If you haven’t for more ces stuff coming up thanks for watching and i’ll catch, you guys in the next one peace .