A blurry Loom is almost always a resolution ceiling, not a broken recording. Loom captures at whatever resolution your recorder, your plan and your screen allow, then streams that back at whatever quality the viewer's connection can carry. Softness gets introduced at one of those two stages, and they have completely different fixes.
The single most useful thing in Loom's own documentation on this is a mechanism most people never hear about: a bigger monitor makes your recording look worse, not better.
What Loom actually says about big monitors
In its page on managing recording quality, Loom lists this among the steps to take when extension recordings look poor:
"If you're using a larger monitor, you will see some quality loss in your recordings. To combat this, you can change your monitor resolution to 1920x1080 to match 1080 pixels guideline."
That is Loom acknowledging the mechanism directly. Your recorder has a fixed pixel ceiling. If your display is larger than that ceiling, everything on it — your editor, your terminal, your browser — has to be squeezed down into fewer pixels than it was drawn with. Text is the first thing to go soft, which is why screen recordings of code and spreadsheets look noticeably worse than recordings of a slide deck.
Loom states the effect without quantifying it, and neither will we. But the direction is official, and the remedy it gives is concrete: drop your display to 1920x1080 before you record, not after.
The same page lists two more steps alongside it:
"Restart your device."
"Ensure Chrome is running with minimal overhead; close all unnecessary tabs and/or applications and make sure you're plugged into a power source."
The power-source detail is worth taking literally. It is in the official list, and it costs nothing to follow.
The ceiling you are actually recording against
Before changing anything, find out which ceiling applies to you. Loom's resolution caps depend on which recorder you use and which plan and role you are on — these are two different limits that stack.
| Recorder | Starter (free) | Paid role on Education / Business / Business + AI / Enterprise |
|---|---|---|
| Chrome extension | up to 720p | up to 1080p |
| Mac desktop app | up to 720p | up to 4K |
| Windows desktop app | up to 720p | up to 4K (Cam only mode is capped at 1080p) |
| Meeting recordings | 1080p, fixed | 1080p, fixed |
Every cell above comes from Loom's own pages. On the extension, Loom writes: "The Chrome extension can record up to 1080p (if you are on Looms Education, Business, Business+ AI or Enterprise plan). Loom Starter users can choose their recording resolution up to 720p." For the Windows app it writes "up to 4K (it's not possible to record above 1080p on Cam only)".
Two consequences fall straight out of that table:
- If you are on the free Starter plan, 720p is your ceiling on every recorder. A 720p capture of a large screen is exactly the case Loom's monitor advice is aimed at.
- If you need better than 1080p, the Chrome extension cannot give it to you. Asked whether Business or Enterprise customers can record HD with the extension, Loom answers: "Unfortunately, no. This is a limitation of Chrome and one of the reasons we built the desktop app." That is Loom's stated reason, not a guess.
A third one catches people in paid workspaces: a Creator Lite role is "limited to resolutions under Loom Starter free plan" even though the workspace is paid. If your colleague records sharper video than you on the same plan, check roles before you check settings. We cover the related symptom in why Loom still limits you to 5 minutes after upgrading.
The fix, in order
- Set your display to 1920x1080 and record again. This is Loom's own first-line remedy for extension recordings.
- Switch recorder if you need more than 1080p. The desktop app goes up to 4K on Mac and Windows; the extension does not.
- Check the dropdown for a warning. Loom notes you "may see a 'not supported by your device' alerting you that that high resolutions are disabled in your desktop quality selector. This will happen if your device's height or camera height does not support recording in those high resolutions." If high options are greyed out, the device, not the app, is refusing.
- Enlarge a custom recording area. For custom-size recordings Loom warns that "using a smaller custom size can affect the resolution of your video", and that "if your selected area is too small to support 4K, the system may automatically downgrade the recording resolution." The floor is 251 x 251 pixels.
- Close everything else and plug in, per the step quoted above.
If the blur only appears after you download and re-share
Downloads from Loom come out as MP4, and Loom describes the download's encoding as "similar to the RAW media recorded" — similar, not identical. That file is usually fine. What tends to ruin it is the next step: dragging the MP4 into a chat app or upload form that squeezes it to fit a size cap, with no control over how.
If a size limit is what stands between you and sending the clip, compress it deliberately instead of letting something else do it blind.
Try it right here
Runs in your browser. Your file is not uploaded anywhere.
This runs in your browser tab — the file is read from disk, re-encoded locally, and handed back. Nothing is uploaded. If you want the general version of this trade-off, our video compressor and the rest of the Clapr tools cover the same ground for any source, not just Loom.
When it is the player, not the recording
Sometimes the recording is fine and the playback is soft. Loom's web player uses adaptive streaming, and says so plainly: "The Loom web player will automatically choose the highest-quality version of the video that your internet connection can support. As your available bandwidth fluctuates, the quality of the stream will adapt to ensure continuous playback without buffering. This is why you sometimes see the playback quality change."
So a Loom that starts blurry and sharpens a few seconds in is behaving as designed. Two follow-ons worth knowing:
- Loom's auto-quality setting "will calculate the highest possible resolution for each viewer based on internet connection and what resolution the creator of the video recorded in" — the resolution you record at is one of the two inputs to what every viewer gets.
- "The video quality selector is not available for video's that have been trimmed or stitched at this time." If the manual quality menu has vanished on an edited video, that is why.
If the problem is colour or brightness, not sharpness
Washed-out or oddly lit footage is a separate troubleshooting path, and Loom scopes it explicitly: "These steps apply only to the Loom desktop app." Its steps include toggling off Touch up my appearance and Auto lighting, and on Windows, opening Settings, then System, then Display, then Graphics settings, and toggling off Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling. Loom also points Windows users at a Use fallback recorder option, noting that "switching the recording engine can resolve visual artifacts or brightness discrepancies."
How to tell it worked
Record ten seconds of the same screen before and after the change and compare a paragraph of small text, not a photo — text shows resampling immediately. Then confirm the resolution you expected is actually offered in the recorder's quality dropdown; if the option you want is greyed out, you are still hitting a device or plan ceiling rather than a settings problem.
FAQ
Why is my Loom recording blurry on a 4K monitor? Loom states that with a larger monitor "you will see some quality loss in your recordings" and recommends changing your monitor resolution to 1920x1080. Your recorder's pixel ceiling is fixed, so a bigger desktop gets squeezed into it.
What resolution does Loom record in? It depends on the recorder and the plan. Starter users can record up to 720p. On paid Education, Business, Business + AI or Enterprise roles the Chrome extension reaches 1080p and the desktop apps reach 4K. Meeting recordings are set at 1080p and, per Loom, "can't be adjusted".
Can I record in HD with the Loom Chrome extension? Loom's answer to that exact question is "Unfortunately, no. This is a limitation of Chrome and one of the reasons we built the desktop app." The extension tops out at 1080p on paid plans. See our extension vs desktop app quality comparison for the format differences too.
Why does my Loom look sharp sometimes and blurry other times? That is adaptive streaming. Loom's player picks the best version your connection supports and adapts as bandwidth fluctuates, which Loom says is "why you sometimes see the playback quality change." The stored recording has not changed.
Does downloading the video give me a higher-quality copy? Downloads are MP4 and Loom describes them as "similar to the RAW media recorded" — not sharper than what was captured. Download permissions also vary by plan and role; see when Loom will not let you download a video.
All quotes above come from Loom's official help documentation, checked 16 September 2026. The pages we could find describe recording bitrate only as "Variable bitrate" — if you need exact encoding numbers, check the current official documentation. More troubleshooting write-ups live in the fix guides.
