When you’re in a video call with friends and family or for business reasons, you want your webcam feed to be as clear and as high quality as possible. The obvious ways to increase webcam image quality are to have a high-quality webcam and a good internet connection to allow you to upload your webcam video fast enough.
Zoom offers an option that can help to make your video a little less fuzzy. The feature is called “De-noising” and it uses software processing to attempt to clear up image quality. One of the things that de-noising can particularly help to improve is grainy video caused by the lighting being too dim and the artificial brightening being used to correct it. The process of brightening a video inherently ends up including more static or “noise” in the signal and “de-noising” can help to improve, although not completely correct that.
As it is a software processing function “de-noising” can decrease the performance of your computer and can add a small delay to your webcam stream. What’s worse is if you’ve got decent webcam image quality, then de-noising isn’t making any real appreciable image improvements but is still costing you system performance.
If you want to disable video de-noising, you need to go into Zoom’s settings. To access the settings, click on your user icon in the top-right corner, then click on “Settings”.
Once in the settings, switch to the “Video” tab, then click the “Advanced” button at the bottom of the page.
In the advanced video settings, untick the top checkbox, labelled “Optimise video quality with de-noise”. To be able to see the change, you will have to click “Back” at the top of the page to see the webcam preview in the main video settings.
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