Lenovo has done the impossible: a webcam built into the laptop screen

We’ve been chasing bezel-less laptops for a long time now, but with the importance of webcams these days, that dream has been sidelined.

That is, unless you could the impossible. Which is what Lenovo has done with its new Yoga Slim 9i, a new laptop announced at CES 2025. The laptop claims to use the world’s first “camera-under-display” technology, allowing for Lenovo to create a device with a 98% screen-to-body ratio. The only laptops with bezels that get close to this small are MacBooks, which use an ugly (and inconvenient) notch to house the camera. The Yoga Slim 9i gives you a complete screen without any distractions. It looks absolutely stunning.

And when you’re ready to use your camera, the system turns off the pixels just in front of where the webcam normally would, allowing the camera behind to poke through. Of course, as you can imagine, that doesn’t offer the camera much light to work with. Lenovo has two solutions. First, it uses a 32-megapixel camera to try and pull in as much light as possible. Second, Lenovo has partnered with an AI image processing company called Visionary.ai to correct the distorted image, especially in lowlight scenarios.

It’s only made possible, of course, due to the fact that the Yoga Slim 9i has a camera bump on the back to compensate for the thinness of the lid. Lenovo then has an extra AI feature built into it that reduces glare.

That’s a whole lot of work to generate an image that is, admittedly, not all that great. If you have decent lighting, this could be a passable camera to use for your work video calls. In less-than-good lighting, however, the image is definitely garbled.

And yet, I still find myself impressed.

The camera trick alone isn’t enough to make it one of the best laptops, of course. Fortunately, Lenovo has made this a premium contender in just about every way. The screen itself, for example, is quite high-end. It’s a 14-inch, 3840 x 2400 OLED panel with a 120Hz refresh rate and 750 nits of peak brightness. That means HDR content is really going to pop.

Lenovo says the display uses an “impact-resistant glass” to protect against drops and scratches, calling the look a “cat-eye-like 3D sheen.” I’m honestly not sure what that means, but having seen it myself, I do see the interesting effect the display has. Light refracts off it in a unique way.

The design of the laptop maintains the glossy, rounded edges the Yoga 9i is known for, but this time around it’s even more radical. The keyboard and trackpad now stretch out to fill the empty space, adding some extra function keys over to the right. The keyboard itself also now has a longer key travel of 1.5mm, but they still featured the iconic scooped shape of the keycaps.

The bottom of the laptop has an interesting curved shape, which measures just 0.57 inches at its thinnest point. Lenovo has put just two ports on this laptop, and neither is a headphone jack. There are just two Thunderbolt 4 ports, one on each side.

My one other complaint is that I wish it used a haptic feedback touchpad. For a laptop of this price and caliber, I’d have loved to see it uses a haptic feedback touchpad instead of a mechanical one.

Even still, the new Yoga Slim 9i is officially the laptop I’m most excited to spend some more time with.