Surface Pro 7 Front Camera Not Working

Anonymous
2019-10-29T19:25:09+00:00

I'm not sure when it started, since I hadn't used the front camera on the device at all, but today I noticed in the Device manager that the "Surface Camera Front" has an error:

This device cannot start. (Code 10) STATUS_DEVICE_POWER_FAILURE.

Sure enough, upon opening the camera app, it acts as though I only have the back camera installed.  I am predictably unable to bring up the front camera.

Is there possibly a driver issue, or is this a hardware flaw?

Thanks!

**Edit**: Problem persists through reboots, disable/reenable, troubleshooter, etc.  Notably, I realized the front camera worked for at least the first hour that I had the device, since it shows you the camera feed when setting up Windows Hello.

Surface | Surface Pro | Sound and camera

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  1. Barb Bowman 80,810 Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2020-03-22T10:28:28+00:00

    If a repair install did not work, did you:

    toggle cameras off and on in the UEFI

        1. Shut down your Surface and wait 10 seconds.
        2. Press and hold the volume-up button on your Surface and at the same
    time, press and release the power button.
        3. The Microsoft or Surface logo appears on your screen. Continue to
    hold the volume-up button. Release the button once the UEFI screen appears.

    and if that did not work, you can try the downloadable recovery image
    https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/surfacerecoveryimage  
    if still an issue after that, if it were me, I'd pursue an exchange as Microsoft
    has not even acknowledge that this is a bug.

     I'm an unpaid volunteer and do not work for Microsoft. If you want background
    on what a Microsoft MVP is, see https://mvp.microsoft.com/en-us/Overview and for
    Volunteer Moderators see
    https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/page/faq#faqWhosWho1

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  2. Anonymous
    2020-03-23T14:07:37+00:00

    Barb,

    Yes, thank you. I had tried the UEFI toggling already as well as the recovery image. I am going to pursue a warranty exchange.

    Much Appreciated.

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  3. Anonymous
    2020-04-03T15:40:24+00:00

    I would like to also know if there are a number of warranty exchanges for this issue without spending the hours to go through all the gyrations suggested by this thread?  Unfortunately, until the COVID19 issue, I didn't use my camera until the warranty period probably expired for my machine.  But what is Microsoft doing for this?

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  4. Anonymous
    2020-04-03T15:50:03+00:00

    No, I spent HOURS on the phone with customer support trying to fix and no solution.  They FINALLY sent me a replacement device and it happened again.  

    I found that when the device was trying to sign me in using facial recognition (which it failed repeatedly), it was screwing up the camera once I got logged in.  I turned the facial recognition log-in option off and that seems to have fixed the problem.

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  5. Anonymous
    2020-04-03T16:53:50+00:00

    Thanks for replying.  I am wondering how my machine is continuing to log me in with facial recognition if the front camera isn't really working.  Makes me nervous indeed....

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