OMEN 16 2023's webcam is showing up on Windows as covered even after I physically uncover it

[Hitomajiri]

Hi,

My OMEN 16 2023 (16-xf0033dx) has a physical camera cover that can be switched on by moving the slider above the camera to the left (thus physically covering the camera) and switched off by moving it to the right (thus physically uncovering it). It looks like that, in addition to the physical mechanism to cover it, a toggle is enabled via software that shows a "forbidden" camera icon whenever it is covered, as shown below:

However, the camera is being detected as covered in in the built-in Camera app and in conferencing apps (such as Skype, Teams, Zoom etc.) even when I physically uncover it by moving the slider to the right, rendering the camera unusable.

What's even weirder is that the problem shows up in the Camera app and in other apps only when the app's window is maximized. Not having the app's window maximized solves the issue temporarily, but this is clearly not an ideal solution.

It appears that someone else was having a similar issue with their OMEN 16's webcam here in the Community, but it's unclear from the post whether it was the 2023 model like mine or an older model. Their post mentions that the slider became "dislodged" but this is clearly not the case here, as the slider in my laptop is all the way to the right. Their post also doesn't mention that the issue only shows up when apps are maximized, so I believe it's a different issue.

I'm guessing that this could be a software issue, but uninstalling and reinstalling the camera's driver from Device Manager didn't work. Moreover, there appears to be no driver to test out other than Microsoft's default one from 2006 (the camera shows up as "HP True Vision FHD Camera" in Device Manager and the driver version is 10.0.22621.3672). I've also tried resetting my PC back to factory settings by going to Settings > Recovery > Reset PC but that didn't work either. One last thing I tried was finding a different driver here in the Community, in my laptop's support page and in Snappy Driver Installer Origin, but there's no driver to update.

Any help is appreciated. This is an expensive laptop, so I'd really like to see a solution for this problem.

Thanks and regards,