Elgato Gaming is seriously aiming to be your one-stop shop for everything you need to get
a live stream up and running.
Game console capture cards, camera capture cards, green screen, macro keypads, and now…
lighting?
I’m always super nervous when a “gaming” company dips their feet into actual production
gear as they usually either just add a logo and a price increase on someone else’s product
or just get it so very wrong - as in the case of many “gaming” microphones.
But does the Elgato Key Light hold up compared to the competition?
The short answer is, well, yes.
The ModMic Wireless can boldly go where no mic has gone before…
This microphone can attach to any headphones, requires no additional wires, features very
low latency, dual capsule microphone, 12 hour battery life, and LED indicators on the receiver
so you know when you’re muted or the battery is running low.
And you can basically run your entire house without losing a signal.
What more could you ask for?
Learn more by clicking the link in the video description.
Typically a streaming setup with a camera needs some serious lighting to have a clean
facecam image - and even more to really fill out a chroma key setup.
The problem is that soft boxes take up a lot of space, good soft LED lights typically need
to be big, and CFL bulbs produce a LOT of heat.
My own desktop tutorial facecam setup has a roll-flex LED panel with diffusion material.
It’s super soft and looks great but the light itself looks a tad… ridiculous up
there….
To say the least.
I’ve looked into LED studio lighting a lot over the past year or two, so I was stoked
to review this.
The Elgato Key Light aims to tackle all those awful streaming setup headaches.
It’s a thin, lightweight LED panel that comes with a basic tilt adjustment head and
a fantastic, sturdy pole mount that clamps to your desk.
The light features quarter-inch threaded taps on all sides, which are commonly used for
most tripods and light stands and so on, so you can mount it on any side or use it with
your existing clamps or light stands and so on.
By name, this is meant to be a Key Light - meaning the primary light on your subject or face.
You can use a second one as a fill light at a lower brightness to help reduce shadows
on the face, or rely on bounce lighting or existing room lighting.
This really wouldn’t work for a backlight or kicker light, as you can see here, it’s
just too large and obvious on-camera, but you could try.
This light is also soft and bright enough that you could use it to light your green
or blue screen backdrop for chroma keying.
The light itself is simple and pretty impressive.
It’s just a flat, thin LED panel with an opal diffusion sheet so you have nice, soft
diffused light - and the light is big enough to provide a soft light source without being
too big in your setup.
The problem with small LED panels is that they still end up giving hard light without
some distance and a diffusion layer.
This is quite soft.
And most lights like this - there’s a few from Dracast and FalconEyes - the cheaper
ones are usually edge-lit and it’s quite obvious with hotspots around the edges, but
you can’t see the individual LEDs at all with this.
Just completely soft through and through.
Nice.
The stand is at least thoughtful.
It has a solid clamp to clamp on most desks with a handle that provides more leverage
than most, but might be a tight fit with some setups compared to other desk clamps.
The pole arm itself has spin-to-tighten adjustment dials to adjust height from a minimum desk
to light height of 22 inches and a max height of 46 and a half inches.
This should be more than enough range for most streamers.
It’s pretty sturdy through and through, with a little wobble when fully extended,
but that’s if you’re really pushing on it.
The pole itself is not detachable from the clamp, however - which kind of prevents me
from using it in my primary desk setup, as I’d have to start pulling monitors and such
out to get it behind everything with the pole pre-attached.
Clamps are not super friendly to against-wall desks.
The light is wall powered - no option for batteries.
Would have loved to see Sony NPF support here.
The included power cord is decently long, but a little extra length would’ve been
nice given the height range it can extend to.
The Elgato Key Light connects to your computer and smartphones via wifi.
You must first set it up with something that has wifi itself.
At the time of reviewing, an Android app wasn’t available - only iOS or PC and Mac, so I used
my 2013 Macbook Pro to do the initial setup and get the light on my Wifi network.
From there I can control it via my main PCs and even the Elgato Stream Deck.
The Control center app lets you manage multiple Elgato Key Lights at once, controlling power,
brightness - this thing can get INSANELY bright at a max brightness of 2500 lumens - and color
temperature from 2900K up to 7000K.
I keep most of my lighting around 6000K to keep white balance settings matched across
cameras and matched up to my main video light, the Aputure c120d.
The Stream Deck can turn your lights on and off, change the color temperature, or change
the brightness all at the press of a button.
I hope they let you group lights to be able to control them all with one button soon.
This light can do wonders to improve the on-camera visuals of most content creators - Twitch
game streamers, makeup YouTubers, tech reviewers, and even photographers.
I found that the softness of the light meant that even cheaper webcams tend to look nicer
as a result.
Though it’s worth noting that if you don’t have enough backlight, webcams will still
tend to over-expose and look burned, but real cameras hooked up to the Elgato Cam Link will
look amazing, assuming you dial your settings in and match white balance to the color temperature,
etc.
I only have one of these, so I can’t really test chroma keying performance or anything.
If you get two, instead of having them both on your face - that would get blinding and
probably look unflattering - I might recommend using the second to clear out shadows on your
green screen for cleaner chroma keying.
Honestly, this light is leagues more convenient - for at-desk use - than my Dracast LED panel
of similar design, and costs significantly less.
This thing comes in at around $130 US, beating out similar ideas from FalconEyes and Dracast,
while being much more convenient to use for streaming setups, specifically.
Sure, by being targeted for streamers, these can be more limiting in their use case, but
as long as you have a computer or phone handy and don’t mind running it off wall-power,
these lights can be used for just about anything.
I’m certainly glad I have this in the studio and I hope to pick another up for my main
desk setup once I figure out how to squeeze the pole arm in there.
THAT BEING SAID… for $130, that’s a hefty investment to jump into streaming - though
you get what you pay for - and I’m not sure I’d entirely recommend starting out with
such a pricey light.
I also have this small ultra-thin diffused LED from Pangshi that was $40 on Amazon that
can almost get you most of the way there - this model specifically is no longer available,
but there are others light it usually - but the light isn’t color accurate at all (most
at this price point aren’t) and you need some diffusion material to even come close
to the softness that the Elgato provides.
But there are options.
Though this one doesn’t come with a stand, clamp, power supply, etc. so… yeah.
These were just announced, I received a pre-release unit for review - so when I can I’ll have
product links in the video description.
While you’re down there, hit the like button and subscribe for more tech education.
I’m EposVox and I’ll see you next time.