Sony Vaio SA Webcam

I had my Sony vaio SA for a few days now. When I tried to webcam with a friend, the image was almost black and white and really unclear. I've tried tweaking the settings, but nothing worked. I read somewhere online that it could be due to one of the windows updates and I should system restore it to before I did the update. That didn't help either. Anyone have any suggestions or are experiencing the same thing? or should i just take it to the sony store.

 

Just tried out my new VAIO SA with wecam and I'm facing the exact same problem!

Anyone able to help out?

 

Try fiddling with the settings, it should improve quite a lot

 

Just played around with the settings, I can get a bit of red in there now, no sign of blue tho.

something is not right..

 

Mine is the same! It also SUCKS SUCKS SUCKS in low light! I don't think i am emphasizing this statement enough. My 4 year old non HD webcam camera on my HP was miles ahead of it in terms of low light performance. This webcam is beyond horrible...

It's really quite sad IMO.

 

Yeah I noticed the same. I was skyping to my brother and he commented that I appeared in black and white.

Only way to fix it seemed to be to aim a desk-lamp at you.

Disappointing that the picture on his three year old mac looked so much better than mine.

 

Actually, the best thing you can do is to pull the saturation completely back in the skype camera settings. Being B&W, the images looks much cleaner. If people ask, just say you're trying to be creative!

 

no its just that the starting brightness settings for the camera program is low when its first opened, so I just increased it and iwt works perfectly fine now

 

Hey guys, I had the exact same problem. I've found that by going into either of the following:

> Arcsoft's Webcam Companion, going to 'Capture' and then playing with the Advanced webcam settings
> or Skype's Video Settings and hitting the Webcam Settings button

that if you increase Gain to maximum, it will drastically improve the quality of the picture. It does add a fair bit of noise though, but that's to be expected. I also find that if you enable the 'Noise reduction' setting on the Enhance tab of Arcsoft's Magic-i Visual Effects, it gets rid of a lot of the noise that was added with the gain increase.

I've attached a screenshot so you can see what I've done, try it for yourself!

You should now have much better webcam image quality!

 

Still there's no excuse why the image quality from the webcam on the VAIO SA is much worse than the VAIO Z11, despite having a better sensor inside.

 

I did my first video chat today on my Vaio F and I was shocked by the poor quality. I used your config and it made all the difference! You rock!

 

Surprisingly, if you do NOT install any of the Sony utilities/drivers relating to the webcam it works great. Not the best webcam ever, but it copes well with low light conditions and carries color over quite well.

 

hmm so should i uninstall the sony drivers and use the default drivers? or use the sony one with the tweaks (max saturation, etc)?)

 

Has anyone else tried uninstalling the Sony drivers? I am thinking that will not help. I hope I am wrong though!

 

Interesting enough, the Gain does seem to be the main issue as The_Z stated. After i read his post, i though I always had that adjusted correctly, but I never did. I just played with the Gain a few minutes ago and WOW, what a difference! Especially in lower light! Changing the Gain control from the default (1) to 4 really does make a huge difference lol

Now i am happy

 

If Windows 8 displays messages like "USB Device not recognized", try to reset BIOS settings to default. Camera in my VPC-SA was successfully recognized after reset (as USB 2.0 Camera).