answers to poor camera quality?

[Karl Auer]

My newish laptop running Ubuntu 20.04 reports this integrated camera:

   04ca:7070 Lite-On Technology Corp. Integrated Camera

My partner has the identical laptop (Lenovo Legion Y540(15)), but runs
Windows on it.

The quality of the video delivered by the camera under Windows is
excellent; that delivered by mine is very poor. As best I can tell, the
camera is not focusing well and/or is not delivering its full
resolution. In zoom, skype etc the video from my camera looks as if
comes from the year 2000 - very grainy.

I have googled myself into oblivion - I can find nothing for modern
Linux that provides any useful form of camera control!

The "cheese" program  allows me to change hue, contrast, saturation
etc, but nothing helps the overall quality of the picture. There are a
lot of mentions in Google of a program called gtk-v4l2, but it seems to
have died in about 2010 and is not in the Ubuntu repos. I found a
useful set of command line tools in the v4l2-utils package, but to be
honest I am overwhelmed by the number of options. I cannot see how to
use them to improve the output quality of the camera.

What do other people do to control their laptop webcams?

Is there a currently available GUI program to set camera settings?

Yours hopefully, K.

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)
http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer

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