ASUS R500A-BB71-CB webcam issues

Hi I recently bought a used ASUS R500A-BB71-CB laptop. It had Windows 8.1 installed but was riddled with malware and did not have the original recovery disks or partition. I installed a clean copy of Windows 7 Home Premium and used the Windows COA from the bottom of the laptop to activate. Everything seemed fine after installing all of the drivers on the ASUS site for the R500A. I then tried out the webcam and am surprised at how bad it is. I am just wondering if this is as good as I can expect from this webcam or is there something wrong? Color palette looks 256 colors.
I checked out the device driver and its:
USB2.0 UVC VGA WebCam
Microsoft - 6/21/2006 - 6.1.7601.18208
USB\VID_13D3&PID_5710&REV_1130&MI_00
USB\VID_13D3&PID_5710&MI_00

 

It looks like the laptop was originally designed for windows 8, so the windows 7 driver for the camera may be unsupported. That said the camera is rated at .3 (Thats point three) megapixels, so yea its a crappy camera.

 

Hi, thanks for the reply. I guess the one I got must have come out just before they switched to Windows 8 because it has a Windows 7 Home Premium COA on the bottom. Anyway, I did install Windows 8.1 to see if that made a difference but the picture and video quality was still crap. I didn't think anyone would still be using something so bad, I thought by now all manufactures could only get half decent stuff. I have an Acer netbook that has better picture quality. I don't really care about the resolution, but I'm puzzled by how few colors there seem to be, so much banding. If anyone else has an R500A, could you please comment on the picture quality you get thru Skype or lifeframe 3.

 

Nope, even my 1k asus laptop with 1080p ips screen has a pretty sad 720p webcam. They are designed to be functional, not to record and take pictures you want to save.

 

Pretty crazy. I thought I might be having driver issues. The picture I put in my original post was probably as good as it gets, most of the time it looks like a negative or some psychedelic movie when I'm talking to someone on Skype.

 

Here is a better example of how bad the built-in webcam is. I have used the same program to capture the images on the same laptop. One picture was captured using the built-in webcam and the other was captured using an external webcam plugged into a USB port.

If you can't guess which is which, the image from the built-in webcam is on the left. To get the full effect you have to click on the picture to get the bigger image. Both are 640x480 which I use for skype.

 

it looks like if you give it enough light its ok. It looks like all that banding is a feature of either the hardware or software to smooth out the massive amount of noise that happens in low light.

 

Integrated laptop webcams are often terrible when it comes to ISO, but then the optics and electronics that make for better cameras aren't being squeezed into a 10 - 12 mm space.