The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.

    webcam looks like graph paper. what?

    Discussion in 'HP' started by dbohls, Sep 20, 2011.

  1. dbohls

    dbohls Notebook Enthusiast

    Reputations:
    7
    Messages:
    14
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    5
    When I skype with friends, my friends and myself see my image in this strange grid format, as though someone overlayed engineering or graph paper over my image. When I view images from the webcam in other contexts, such as taking a screenshot, everything looks fluid and good. Does anyone know where I might go to change this? I'd imagine the webcam itself is fine, but I don't understand why this laptop looks bad whereas my previous laptop of the same model looked great on skype with no adjustment. Any insight is greatly appreciated.
     
    dbohls, Sep 20, 2011
    #1
  2. asdalavisa

    asdalavisa Newbie

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    9
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    5
    Hi dbohls, to help fix your problem, would you be able to do a print screen, and show us a picture of what it looks like? Thanks, it is because sometimes there may be rectangles over your webcam output feed showing how data is loading and that goes into a whole other topic of video. It may be internet connection if that is the case. Hope i can help :)
     
    asdalavisa, Sep 21, 2011
    #2
  3. dbohls

    dbohls Notebook Enthusiast

    Reputations:
    7
    Messages:
    14
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    5
    Sure, I can get someone to skype tonight and get a screenshot. In the mean time, this is the closest thing I could find on google images. My webcam image is partitioned into equally spaced vertical and horizontal lines causing the image to be chopped in to equally size blocks. My sister said it looks like I'm in the matrix.

    http://davidmburrow.com/graph-paper.jpg
     
    dbohls, Sep 21, 2011
    #3
  4. Paul_At_HP

    Paul_At_HP Company Representative

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    45
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    15
    Might be your video drivers, make you have installed the latest driver updates. Let me know how it turns out...
     
    Paul_At_HP, Sep 22, 2011
    #4
  5. dbohls

    dbohls Notebook Enthusiast

    Reputations:
    7
    Messages:
    14
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    5
    I finally figured out the problem. It is the webcam setting called "Backlight Compensation". If I turn this off (to zero) then the frame rate drastically increases and the "graph paper" look goes away.

    I found out by chance because I skyped someone from my patio when there was a lot of sunlight and they told me the webcam looked great. I stepped inside my house and all of a sudden, the frame rate dropped and the graph paper look started.
     
    dbohls, Sep 28, 2011
    #5