T410 Webcam problem
Posted: Fri Oct 14, 2016 11:19 am
Hello all.
I recently bought a refurbished T410 with windows 7 installed and all works great except for the webcam: the camera was barely ok and no better (in fact its worse) than the 1.3 megapixel webcam on my older and no longer working HP 6530B laptop.
I thought installing Windows 10 might see better results as Lenovo's support states to use the Win 10 native driver...and its a lot worse. The camera app and Skype do work with it, but I cannot change any setting other the ratio and flicker (and I have to change that to 50mhz or I get serious flicker). There is no option to change pixel size, or size and frame rates for videos (only option shown is 1600×1200 at 15 fps when I should get 1600×1200 at 30 fps). Taking a 'photo' or video produces the correct image size, but it looks like a sub 1 megapixel camera photo upscaled (badly) to that size (far too blurry, grainy, noisy and useless).
There is no evident problem with the lens cover, and I have removed the bezel and the camera seems like the genuine one (Ricoh RU877 chip, correct part numbers etc). Nothing seems wrong with the camera lens either. I did try installing the Win 7 driver over the default Win 10 one but it caused nothing but lags and the camera app refused to detect the webcam with that driver installed.
Have since reverted back to Win 7 for now as I can get a better result (though still well below par and not looking like 2 megapixels at all in any light) so I'm guessing the webcam itself has gone bad? Is it possible it's stuck on a much lower resolution and is upscaling, or is it more likely the sensor behind the lens is simply knackered? Btw, have used Skype with it and at the other end they say the video coming through is utterly terrible (and this is with Win 7...can only imagine the mess they'd get with Win 10).
Thanks in advance for any help that can be offered here. I'd also be grateful if there is a link to any Camera application that I can use to check it out as well (the communications function via Fn + F6 is only usable with Win 7, and doesn't produce any better results sadly). Lastly if anyone can upload samples of what I should be getting from this webcam I'd appreciate that too as it would give me a frame of reference should I need to replace the webcam (which I am guessing is likely atm).
I recently bought a refurbished T410 with windows 7 installed and all works great except for the webcam: the camera was barely ok and no better (in fact its worse) than the 1.3 megapixel webcam on my older and no longer working HP 6530B laptop.
I thought installing Windows 10 might see better results as Lenovo's support states to use the Win 10 native driver...and its a lot worse. The camera app and Skype do work with it, but I cannot change any setting other the ratio and flicker (and I have to change that to 50mhz or I get serious flicker). There is no option to change pixel size, or size and frame rates for videos (only option shown is 1600×1200 at 15 fps when I should get 1600×1200 at 30 fps). Taking a 'photo' or video produces the correct image size, but it looks like a sub 1 megapixel camera photo upscaled (badly) to that size (far too blurry, grainy, noisy and useless).
There is no evident problem with the lens cover, and I have removed the bezel and the camera seems like the genuine one (Ricoh RU877 chip, correct part numbers etc). Nothing seems wrong with the camera lens either. I did try installing the Win 7 driver over the default Win 10 one but it caused nothing but lags and the camera app refused to detect the webcam with that driver installed.
Have since reverted back to Win 7 for now as I can get a better result (though still well below par and not looking like 2 megapixels at all in any light) so I'm guessing the webcam itself has gone bad? Is it possible it's stuck on a much lower resolution and is upscaling, or is it more likely the sensor behind the lens is simply knackered? Btw, have used Skype with it and at the other end they say the video coming through is utterly terrible (and this is with Win 7...can only imagine the mess they'd get with Win 10).
Thanks in advance for any help that can be offered here. I'd also be grateful if there is a link to any Camera application that I can use to check it out as well (the communications function via Fn + F6 is only usable with Win 7, and doesn't produce any better results sadly). Lastly if anyone can upload samples of what I should be getting from this webcam I'd appreciate that too as it would give me a frame of reference should I need to replace the webcam (which I am guessing is likely atm).