How I Fixed My Webcam Lighting for Zoom Calls (2026)

My home office videoconferencing setup is pathetic. For a person who reviews laptops, monitors, webcams, and other home office tech for a living, that shouldn't be possible. But it is.

The reason is simple: Getting a decent videofeed isn't as simple as dropping some cash on a new webcam or on a new laptop with a better webcam. Take it from me—someone who is not exactly a professional videographer but spends enough time in video calls that I thought it worth investing in improving my appearance. My mind immediately jumped to the same conclusion I assume everyone has: Buy a new webcam, right? As I learned in my testing, though, it's not always that straightforward.

Drawn to the Light

Photograph: Luke Larsen

I spend most of my time using the built-in webcam on laptops, largely because I'm a laptop reviewer and I'm constantly switching machines. Once upon a time, laptop webcams were completely irrelevant, happy to stay at 720p resolution forever. Things have improved since the rise of remote work, but I'm not about to call the standardization of 1080p a victory.

Laptop webcams struggle in low light, have poor image processing, and are then compressed by videoconferencing apps. The best in low-light performance is still the 12-megapixel 1080p camera in the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, while the 4K webcam in the Dell XPS 14 has the best sharpness. Both, however, still struggled in my office. The clarity wasn't there, and the camera was often forced to overexpose light sources to brighten up my face or left me as a ghostly silhouette haunting my weekly meetings. In particular, I'm talking about the two windows in the back of our office. They let in an absolute flood of natural light during the day, backlighting me and throwing my face in shadow. Not great.

The easiest (and cheapest) thing I could do, of course, would be to move my desk next to the window. All of a sudden, the light isn't shadowing me, but falling on my face. I recently stayed in a rental house and took a call in a gloriously-lit office nook by a window. I popped open my laptop and saw the true potential in even a low-quality webcam. It's such a significant difference that simply relocating should be the first order of business.

Photograph: Luke Larsen