HP Privacy Filter & Camera Troubleshooting

On our Windows laptops, HP has included a "Privacy Filter" which is something that can be moved in front of the camera lens to block the webcam for privacy reasons. If you are getting a black screen in Zoom or other applications like this:

You may need to disable this privacy filter. You can tell if the filter is on if there are grey stripes where the lens is.

You can do this by sliding this little notch right above the webcam at the top middle of the screen to the left and the grey lines will disappear.

To re-enable the privacy filter, just slide the notch to the right again.

On some of our older laptops the privacy filter is slightly different. Instead of a little notch and grey lines, there is a larger piece of black plastic that needs to be slid out of the way.

Another thing of note, your webcam can also only be used by one program at a time. If you have any other programs or applications that are currently using the webcam you will need to shut those down before the webcam can be used. (For example, if you are having trouble with your camera in Zoom but earlier you used the webcam for another program (such as Amcap, Camera or Flipgrid) if that other program/website is still open it will prevent Zoom from being able to access your webcam.)

If you are not able to find a program or application using the webcam, you can restart your computer to make sure as that will close anything that is currently using the webcam.

If you are still having trouble getting your webcam to work, you may want to try updating your computer's drivers. You can easily do this by following our guide ( Updating drivers on HP Computers )

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