Why does it look like I am in a cave? Windows TEAMS meetings on new lap

January 17, 2022 8:14 AM

I have a new Dell laptop for work. I do TEAMS meetings most of the day in a small room that doesn’t have a window but does have over head lighting, a ring light and an additional lamp. The lighting is consistent and was fine on calls with my old laptop. I looked like a person sitting in an room with decent if not particularly amazing lighting.

With my new laptop, I look like I am in a cave, but sometimes randomly that cave gets bright and then dark again over the course of a few minutes despite me not doing anything to the actual lighting in the room. It’s weird and distracting, and I don’t know how to fix this.

There aren’t options to tweak lighting settings in TEAMs. What is happening and how do I change settings or lighting (open to buying more lamps) so that I look human again ?

posted by walkinginsunshine to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Sounds like crappy auto-exposure/auto-color hunting to me. It may be possible to set the camera parameters in some other piece of webcam software; if Teams isn't explicitly overriding the current settings they'll likely stick. Googling finds this Dell support thread, where people end up using Skype to dig into camera options.
posted by Alterscape at 8:18 AM on January 17, 2022 [2 favorites]

If you have brand-new-to-you laptop - and are not using your own 3rd party webcam - then I presume you are using a new built-in webcam as well.

Plenty of (built-in) webcams don't need 3rd party drivers installed, but if your IT team did any kind of imaging, maybe they didn't install whatever driver that particular Dell webcam might need. Kind of a long shot, since we do tons of laptop deployments at work, and while some have proprietary webcam drivers, usually on a vanilla Windows install they work fine without additional driver installing. None of them seem to have special settings anywhere in a Dell software application, anyway. (I'm assuming you are using Windows).

You could also give Dell support a call since if the notebook is brand new, it likely has at least 1 year of warranty support, or post to their support forums - which are surprisingly responsive.
posted by bitterkitten at 8:22 AM on January 17, 2022

I recently had this problem and the solution was to install Skype and adjust the settings in Skype, which also fixed them in Teams. You can then uninstall Skype.

Wild, I know.
posted by DarlingBri at 8:26 AM on January 17, 2022 [8 favorites]

Built-in webcam often has auto-exposure turned on by default, and such features are NOT always kind to darker-skinned folks.

There is a built-in "Webcam" app from Microsoft Win10, which should have some options you can tweak.
posted by kschang at 8:27 AM on January 17, 2022

Skype fix also worked for me.
posted by sulaine at 9:42 AM on January 17, 2022

There is a built-in "Webcam" app from Microsoft Win10, which should have some options you can tweak.

Spoiler alert: it does not.
posted by DarlingBri at 2:54 PM on January 17, 2022 [1 favorite]