Color Image Enhancement

I am working on a matlab code which takes live webcam video, takes snapshots & saves as .avi file. But when I play back the stored .avi file the video quality is very poor, low contrast,brightness & poor colors. Please help me in enhancing the video quality....regards.

[Walter Roberson]

If you write one of the frames to a file as you are recording the video, then does the individual frame come out poor as well? That is, we need to isolate whether the problem is in the video capture or in the AVI production.