Ultrasonic Fingerprint Scanners aren’t that bad !

When the whole smartphone industry was moving towards a bezel less formfactor, one of the main concerns was to move the fingerprint scanners out of the way so that they can push the screen all towards the edge of the phone. So they were placed at the back of the device and also on the side of the phones, but this was not the perfect placement.

But advancements made way to the introduction of In - Display fingerprint scanners which was first introduced by Vivo in their concept phone ‘Nex’. This was an Optical In - Display Fingerprint Scanner, that captured the fingerprint by shining a light and capturing the fingerprint using a RGB camera which was placed under the display. This also being sometimes less secure, but was slowly adapted by other OEM’s as well.

By this time Samsung has also figured a way to do this in a different manner. Partnering with Qualcomm they introduced the Ultrasonic In - Display Scanner with their S10 series of smartphones.

The naming as usual was not some sort of quirky title given by Samsung, but the term “Ultrasonic” means that the technology uses sound waves and captures the fingerprint and saves the 3D copy of them. Through this being much secure and possessing a lot more advantages than the Optical In - Display Scanners, they were accused of being slower than their counterpart during their initial stages.

And this news spread like fire in the smartphone industry and Samsung received a lot of hate for this move. But even after all this, they continued working on the scanner’s quality.

I have used the S10+ personally for a year now and I feel that the scanner is equally fast or even much faster than the Optical Scanner counterpart available out there. You may ask why do I feel that way? That is because the scanner has constantly received updates and has improved over time. Samsung has really taken some effort to improve the scanner over time and they have made a tremendous job in this part.

The day I started using this phone I also felt the same feeling that the scanner is not as fast as the other counterparts but as days went by and after some updates the phone recognised my finger very well and the scanner could be easily compared with scanners from the OnePlus 6, which had a traditional fingerprint scanner.

All things aside, the fact is that the scanners found in the Samsung’s Flagship series is much better now when compared to the days when it was launched. So if other OEM’s start using the Ultrasonic Scanners there might be a vast improvement in this area than just only improving the Optical counterpart alone.