Why video transferred via USB from camcorder to a laptop is dark, irrespective of video taken indoors or out?

Question

I bought a Dell laptop in 2006 and when I started to transfer my video images taken using my Sony minidv camcorder, the images displayed on the laptop is quite dark. I tried adjusting the contrast as well as the brightness, but there was no impact. The effects was quite dark for both outdoor and indoor images. But no such deterioration of quality occured during transfer from the camcorder to the TV using the AV cables. I had planned to transfer the video images to the laptop to edit them, but with such poor quality of images, I had to abandon the idea.

Answer 1

Are you importing to DV-AVI format?  If not, it could be the codec used by your video editing/transferring software.  Try to transfer the video again using a different software to see if there's a difference.