Fixes for a Washed-Out Screen While Sharing in Teams Meetings
Lately, every time I have shared my screen on a Teams Meeting with other Sympraxians, they have told me my screen looks awful and I should stop sharing. It sounded unpleasant, but I couldn’t see what they were seeing.
Today, with help from the awesome Emily Mancini (@eemancini), I figured out the issue. From a few searches, we found there are several suggested fixes out there.
Disable GPU hardware acceleration – This tells Teams not to use the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) to speed up stuff on the screen. To do this, you click on the ellipses in the upper right of Teams / Settings.
Note that you must restart Teams for this to take effect. This means right clicking on the Teams icon in the system tray and then Quit. This seems to fix a similar issue for many people out there.
Delete the Teams cache – This takes a little more fortitude, and I’m not positive it would help, but the instructions are in the article below.
But neither of these approaches solved the problem for me. Each time I would do a test call with Emily, I would get the equivalent of the vomit emoji. 🤮
I thought back over the timeframe when they had been telling me things were ugly. I recently reconfigured my screens, so I had been fiddling with the settings for each of them: my laptop screen and two external monitors.
As I poked around in those settings, I remembered I’d enabled an appealing-sounding setting called HDR for my laptop screen. This is a setting in Windows 11 that purports the following:
HDR content on Windows offers better brightness and color capabilities compared to traditional content (sometimes called standard dynamic range [SDR] content). Traditional content typically shows details in a bright part of a scene or a darker part of a scene, but not in both parts at the same time. For example, if the shot focuses on a bright window in the scene, details in the shadow are lost.
What is HDR in Windows 11? (microsoft.com)
Sounds nice, right? Well, that was a change, and it had to do with my screen. I disabled HDR and pinged Emily – one last time as it turned out.
Moral of the story: Teams doesn’t seem to play well with this HDR setting. Don’t turn it on for a screen you’d like to share in Teams (my other two screens had been fine for sharing). Thanks, Emily!
God send, good call and thank you so much. It was very frustrating to constantly have to toggle HDR on/off every time I needed to screenshare on Teams.
Fixed it for me, thanks for noting this with Teams! :)