Hello this is the Provoked Prawn and this is the Elgato key light Mini this is an unboxing
and review video I'm going to be talking to you about what this tiny little light is like to use
and comparing it with some other things including the key light air and showing you off the various
different controls and functionality of this key light now this is obviously a little tiny
key light that's designed for creators and has a number of different use cases and ways to use it
applications in which you can use it and highlights to it obviously being an Elgato
product for example it's stream deck controllable controllable from your phone controller from from
your PC and more it also has a number of interesting specs to it and offers
diffused lighting that's comfortable one of the things that's interesting about this is it's not
wired as standard it's actually battery powered so it comes with a 4 000 milliamp battery which they
say will last up to four hours of 50 brightness during my use with it set to a bit brighter than
that I found that you could actually get a good couple of hours out of it before it needs charging
which is no bad thing and obviously you could use it while plugged in as well which is another bonus
also includes this fast charging USB-C cable in the box and nothing else and that was one
of the things that was struck by immediately is the complete lack of anything to mount it with
so there's no bracket to put it on your monitor there's no anything to put it anywhere you just
have the light and the charging cable naturally as with all things nowadays you don't even get
a power brick to plug into the wall with so some minor grumps about this light to start with but
the rest of this video is going to be mostly complementary because it is a wonderful little
bit of kit you can see a very nice good quality finish on the back it's nice and solidly built
and surprisingly bright now it's obviously going to be difficult to do it justice in terms
of the brightness that it offers but I will be showing you some clips later on in a darkened room
and various use cases so stick with me to the end to see me using it for example to do a talking
headpiece to the camera or at least what that would look like and also using it on a camera to
capture footage as I normally would with close-up shots of various products now one of the things
that's interesting is it is magnetic so it will stick to any metal surface that you happen to have
in your room here I'm using one of my disc plates I wouldn't necessarily do this but it is an option
you can also perhaps mount it to your PC although I wouldn't recommend sticking magnets
onto your computer that's not obviously a sensible thing to do it's okay here probably
because it's only just near the front of the fans and obviously through the grill but it
could interfere with other bits of hardware so not recommended but if you happen to have any
bits of metal in the room that are conveniently located then that's handy obviously also because
it's small enough you can just use it holding it in your hand you could just put it onto the
desk I have been using something similar to this for a while now falcon eyes f7 video light which
is a similar portable softbox style light and I'm going to do a versus video to compare the
two but this is very similar in terms of the size and what it offers now I've got 800 lumens
and it has a color range of 2900 to 7000 Kelvin so I'll show you some of that a bit
later on on the underside you will find there is a thread mounting so you can mount it on tripods
and other things if you happen to have one here's a tiny little Manfrotto one that I happen to have
to hand just to demonstrate that obviously this sort of tripod is interesting use case
but you could potentially get it low on the desk so if you're doing something like I do generally
with unboxing things this is actually quite a good option because you can put it low on the desk have
the brightness set quite low put it near just give some accent lighting or highlight lighting to the
things that you're unboxing the focus of the video but there are other options you obviously
could mine set on a bigger tripod you could get a mounting arm from Elgato to mount it too
and there are plenty of different options there so it it's a shame that it doesn't come with any sort
of mounting bracket or stand out of the box but at least you have the options to change it now when
you press and hold that power button you can turn it on you'll also see it has a wi-fi light that
flashes so there are instructions on how to do this essentially just press and hold in the button
and then it would put it into pairing mode you can then find the Elgato control center app
and download that and install it on your phone if you've not already got it installed which I have
and then obviously go into the settings there and link a new accessory I've skipped some of
the steps it does take a couple of minutes to do this you do need to obviously do things like
going through and connecting it to your wi-fi but the end process is adds in as another accessory
in here and then you can remotely control the power of it without having to touch the buttons
and I'll show you why that's important in a minute because there are some onboard controls in terms
of brightness and color range adjustment which you can use but it's much better to use a remote
control such as your phone or your PC you can see that you can easily turn it on and off here
and then adjust the brightness and the color temperature as well quite easily with a slider
it's not necessarily easy to see here but it is possible to see the color temperature that
you're adjusting when you adjust that slider you do get a little indicator to let you know what
Kelvin you're at this is useful because you can obviously then use the white balance on
your camera and set it to the same Kelvin level so that you then have a good accurate
representation of color in the real world but for standard use let's just say you're putting it to
be a key light for your face then you might obviously be able to adjust the warmth of that
just to improve the look of it so here's a shot of it in a dark room you can see a size comparison
next to the key light air on the left there which is obviously mounted on its own separate stand
I have the key light Mini on what is essentially a small tripod that was actually purchased
with my Ronin-S which I bought a while back and it's a smallish stand but actually works
out quite well because it sits behind the monitor quite nicely here so you can use it as a key light
to light up your face on the right hand side if curious is the Logitech Litra glow which I'm going
to be doing a video on separately that's quite a different thing but again you can see that you
can control the lighting in here now apologies for some of what looks like warping on the two
lights in the background that's my camera's auto focus it's not the light themselves they don't
do that weird sort of wobbly effect but you can see you can control the key light Mini alongside
the key light air and link those accessories so the lighting and temperatures also change now
in windows it's also possible to control the light using Elgato's control center software and
obviously this is located in the task manager and you can see it down here it'll not only
let you know how much battery life it's got on there but you can also adjust the brightness
and lighting settings again you can link the accessories as well so if you're combining it
with the other things like my two kilo airs here you can see when you drag the slider that adjusts
the brightness of all of them so it's nice to be able to have all this functionality in one place
being an Elgato product also work with Elgato stream deck so you can just get the control center
settings in here and then you can put brightness settings in really easily and drop them in here
these sorts of things are very useful because it gives you a bit more accurate and logical controls
for the light remotely and you can set specific things so obviously putting a slider on your phone
and trying to get that in the right place to say 50 accurately is quite difficult but if you have a
button you can press that makes life a lot easier now here's an option if you want to mount it on
your camera I've bought a small rig cold shoe mount which has a small ball head on top of it
and this is from small rig and they have some great stuff this is obviously an extra purchase
but I will link in the description so you can see what to buy and this will work perfectly with most
digital cameras if you've got a mount on top that are alpha cultural minting which you should have
or if you purchase one of small rigs camera rigs which are very nice by the way you can then put
this on your camera and mount it in a convenient way so you can see that I'm just popping on top
of the camera here which is one potential option usually you might mount a microphone up here which
is what I do on most of my cameras but if you look at small rigs big sort of camera brackets you can
see that you have the option to mount them on the side perhaps as I said there are many different
options in terms of mounting here you can see what the light looks like in the room now I don't have
any other lights on apart from the main light above my head which isn't particularly bright
doesn't do a good job of lighting the room but you can see some of that on top of my head but you
can see the lighting that this tiny little light offers up in terms of the view that you'll get if
you're using on the camera to then light up your own face obviously some reflections on my glasses
but it is a diffused light and I have actually used it for a long time while streaming and
found that it doesn't affect my vision it's not particularly obnoxious it's well diffused and it's
edgelit I'm gonna leave all the specifications in the description and the other features but it's
edgelit in a way that diffuses the light in a nice way so it's not completely overpowering your eyes
now obviously with it top mounted on top of a camera you can use that to your advantage to
light up situations so as I said earlier usually obviously I'm unboxing things I'm getting clips
close-up clips of products and I want a good lighting especially when using a macro lens
so a good lighting is really important and the fact that you can have this light close
is really diffused and obviously you can adjust the brightness and the color temperature makes
it very appealing for this sort of use so here you can see barely any other lights in the room
apart from some backlighting but you can see some of the diffused lighting on the mouse itself so
you'll see a slight reflection there but what it's doing is a really good job of lighting up the desk
and the surroundings I have it on quite a high setting so you could put it lower
and obviously setting it off to the side might be more beneficial if you have something that's
particularly reflective but it has done actually a really good job of this and I have actually used
my falcon eyes light in this sort of method in the past so it is worth considering if you're a
creator that wants some extra lighting don't want to spend the earth now I just want to
quickly demonstrate one of the problems with the hardware controls so you can adjust the brightness
on the light itself but if you want to switch to color temperature you have to push that wheel in
and then the light will flash to let you know it's changed between brightness and color temperature
modes if you're in the middle of filming you don't want to do this because then you have this
flashing light on the camera which is obviously not ideal that is why it's preferable to use the
remote control settings because then you don't have that option hopefully you found this video
useful let me know in the comments if you've got any questions I'm going to do some comparison
videos with this in the near future including against the falcon eyes like I was talking about
earlier so be sure to hit that subscribe button if you're not already and if you've made it to
this far in a video I really appreciate you hit that like button and thanks for watching this
has been the Provoked Prawn hope you found this video useful interesting hilarious or otherwise
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