There was unfortunately no difference between the ViewPlayCap and the Crystal Eye application (they seem to use the same menu). After some tweaking of the settings in the Crystal Eye program I was able to remove the horrible noise by disabling auto exposure. After some use however, I have noticed that the camera is not in focus. Placing my palm 5 cm away from the camera makes it much sharper than my face. I have also noted that there is a setting for focusing, but it is greyed out. I am guessing there is nothing to do about that... 
Looks like external web camera is the only solution (although this was not necessary on my 7 years older acer laptop! Cannot believe the camera quality can be degraded over all those years!)

I tried to find drivers for the cameras you listed, but was lead to either Lenovo or Asus driver support. Tried to install those, but running the setup did nothing. I want to stress that I believe this is a driver issue, so downloading webcam software, as you mention, will probably do no good. What I need is a working driver. I suppose there is a driver out there, at least something better than the clearly outdated 2006 driver! There is, however, no way for me to find it as I have no idea what make the camera is. 

Another funny thing with the Microsoft 2006 driver is the white balance settings. In the adjustment panel there is a slider which goes from 2800-6500K. At 2800 my face is completely purple. If I check the "auto" setting, the color is better, but my skin has still has a blue tint. For some reason the white balance applied when the auto function is on, cannot be replicated within the 2800-6500K manual range (which goes from purple to solid orange). That is the driver is capable of adjusting the white balance beyond the values available in the manual range. This further confirms my suspicion that this is a driver issue.