Having a weird issue with my camera. Images are basically pitch black under normal indoor lighting. If I point it directly at a bright light source like a desk lamp or out a window, I can barely make out some image details, but it’s extremely dark. Almost like the sensor is barely registering anything at all.
This is an Arducam USB 3.0 Camera — the 20MP, 120fps model, with the 60° 16mm C-Mount lens in the metal case. I’m running it on both Windows and Linux, same behavior on both platforms.
I’m wondering if the camera is maybe streaming RAW data without any automatic color processing or gain being applied? Could this be a RAW-to-RGB conversion issue, or some exposure/gain control that needs to be configured at the driver level? I’m a grad researcher in robotics so I’m comfortable digging into driver settings if needed, but honestly not sure where to start with this.
Based on what you’re describing — completely dark image under normal lighting but faint detail barely visible when pointed at a bright source — this actually sounds a lot more like a physical aperture issue than a software or driver problem.
The C-Mount lens on that Arducam has a manual aperture ring. If the iris is closed down too far (or fully shut), very little light reaches the sensor, and you get exactly these symptoms: near-black images where only extremely bright light sources produce anything discernible.
Before we go down the RAW conversion or driver settings rabbit hole — can you check the aperture ring on the lens? Try rotating it to open the iris wider. You should see the image brighten up significantly once more light is getting through.
Could you also post a clear, front-facing photo of the camera lens as it’s currently set up? That way I can visually confirm what the aperture setting looks like right now. It’ll help us rule out (or confirm) the closed-iris scenario before we waste cycles chasing software issues.
Just to add a bit of context — this is actually a really common pitfall with C-Mount lenses, especially for folks coming from USB webcams or cameras that handle aperture automatically. The manual iris on these lenses can easily get bumped closed during handling or shipping, and since the symptom looks a lot like a gain or exposure processing failure, people understandably jump straight to driver debugging.
General rule of thumb with these: always check the physical lens adjustments first — aperture, focus, any lock screws — before digging into RAW conversion pipelines, exposure APIs, or driver-level gain control. Saves a ton of time.