Hello. A friend wants to use cameras with me, and fortunately, the T420 I am currently using has one. (Well, that is a camera on the top center of the lid, isn't it?) But I have no idea how to verify on the system whether it works. (I bought this T420 used, and I didn't even want to use the camera. Until now, I stuck electrical tape over the camera to make sure hackers could never use it to spy on me.)
I'm running Linux on this computer...if there's any Linux program that makes the camera work, I must not have it installed.
I can see that the F6 key has camera and microphone symbols color-coded for the Fn key, so I can figure out that I should press Fn + F6. But no light or anything appears on the camera to show it's on. That's why I'm posting this.
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my T420's camera: how do I know it's on?
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Re: my T420's camera: how do I know it's on?
Well, after installing some camera software, I discovered that my camera is already on. I can watch myself. So the question becomes not how do I know it's on, but how do I turn it off if I want to? The Fn + F6 does not do exactly what I thought, at least on this software. It doesn't turn the camera on or off, it simply takes a still photo from the video. This is disturbing: a computer has a camera with no obvious way to deactivate it. I'm left with my old solution of blocking the camera with black electrical tape.
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Re: my T420's camera: how do I know it's on?
This is the way most cameras on most laptops are.
You can enable/disable the camera in BIOS so it's not visible to any OS. Fn+F6 is a key combination predestined to be used with "Lenovo Web Conferencing" application, which is used for setting some options related to speakers, microphone and camera and testing if everything works the way we would like it to, e.g. before having a call with a business client etc. As most ThinkPads are perfectly compatible with most linux distros, we cannot expect the manufacturer to focus on linux users and develop drivers and applications for this platform, as it's a minority. 90% of ThinkPads buyers are corpos, running Windows.
The correct camera behavior is that it's off when not used (LED indicator OFF), and when an application require access to the cam, the camera is powered from the mainboard by the controller, and the LED indicator is lit. I don't know of any method to make it behave any different.
Hope this helps.
You can enable/disable the camera in BIOS so it's not visible to any OS. Fn+F6 is a key combination predestined to be used with "Lenovo Web Conferencing" application, which is used for setting some options related to speakers, microphone and camera and testing if everything works the way we would like it to, e.g. before having a call with a business client etc. As most ThinkPads are perfectly compatible with most linux distros, we cannot expect the manufacturer to focus on linux users and develop drivers and applications for this platform, as it's a minority. 90% of ThinkPads buyers are corpos, running Windows.
The correct camera behavior is that it's off when not used (LED indicator OFF), and when an application require access to the cam, the camera is powered from the mainboard by the controller, and the LED indicator is lit. I don't know of any method to make it behave any different.
Hope this helps.
T470
Re: my T420's camera: how do I know it's on?
The LED is supposed to come on when the camera is on.
If you don't need it at all, might as well leave the electrical tape on. If you do think you might want to use it sometimes, get one of the webcam shutters, like this:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/6PCS-WebCam-Sh ... 2952493265
If you don't need it at all, might as well leave the electrical tape on. If you do think you might want to use it sometimes, get one of the webcam shutters, like this:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/6PCS-WebCam-Sh ... 2952493265
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