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The Elgato Facecam wants to give plug-and-play webcams a new lease on life, and content creators everywhere will like the face-hugging specs under the hood. Hybrid work environments and high-resolution web conferencing are now commonplace in home offices, and the best laptops for video editing and the accessories we use with them keep getting better.
For example, some webcams have wide viewing angles for business people and larger groups. Elgato’s Facecam, on the other hand, was “made for creators,” and the company’s website calls it “the world’s most powerful webcam.” Play the Hans Zimmer music in the background while my eyebrows rise slowly.
It’s a big claim, but the optics back it up: the Facecam won an Innovation Award at CES 2022, which bodes well for that beautiful Elgato Prime lens with its f/2.4 aperture, 24-millimeter focal length, and world-class Sony Starvis CMOS.
Elgato Facecam review: Design and Features
The Elgato Facecam is a webcam that will make you look good in the corner of your live streams or right in the middle. To reach this goal and stand out in a market that’s getting more and more crowded, it’s packed with features that make images clearer and give it a more professional feel than any other webcam on the market.
The software is a big part of what makes it special, but it’s not the only thing. As with any camera, the lens and sensor are the most important parts of a good picture. Up to 1080p at 60 FPS can be recorded with the Facecam. It gives a clear, detailed picture with smooth, natural motion on recordings. It has an 82-degree field of view.
Which is in the middle of its two biggest competitors, the Logitech StreamCam (78 degrees) and the Razer Kiyo Pro (103-degrees max, but digitally adjustable to 80 or 90 in Synapse). It’s the same as a 24mm lens on a full-frame camera, and it’s just wide enough to keep you in the middle of the scene without giving you a fisheye effect. It also has an aperture of f2.4, which is a bit slower than the Kiyo Pro or the StreamCam but doesn’t make a big difference in performance. You can buy this facecam from its official website.
Elgato Facecam review: Performance
Everything from low-light gaming with RGB in the background to overhead desk shots to virtual meetings in an office with fluorescent lights. Throughout all of these tests, the 60FPS frame rate of the camera gave a clear image that looked very smooth and natural.
The camera does its most basic job right out of the box, giving a clear, smooth image, but it overexposes the image and loses detail. When compared to the Razer Kiyo Pro, there is no competition. The Kiyo is much better out of the box than the Facecam.
The pictures below show the two cameras next to each other with their default settings (with no HDR). This camera needs to be set up on your own. Without them, it doesn’t stand a chance. With them, that will change a lot.
Elgato Facecam review: Image quality
The Facecam Pro relies on two key features for good image quality: 4K resolution at 60 fps and autofocus. You probably won’t want or need 4K for streaming games because of bitrate limits and the fact that face cams are often too small to benefit from higher resolutions.
However, 4K is useful for other content, like YouTube videos. No matter what you’re recording, autofocus is always helpful. But there are good reasons why you might want a 4K webcam even if you don’t plan to stream or record in 4K. Even when the bitrate is limited, higher-quality footage can look better than lower-quality footage.
Whether the video player says it’s 1080p or 4K. Also, the quality will be much better if you zoom in on a 4K webcam. Even at 400% zoom-in, a 4K webcam has the same quality as a 1080p webcam with no zoom-in. If your webcam is far away, you might want to zoom in a bit when you stream or record videos or are in a digital meeting.
Elgato Facecam review: Controls
If you want to make more specific changes, Elgato has included an easy-to-use ISO reader. ISO stands for “International Organization for Standardization,” which is a fancy way of saying that it sets how much light a camera lets in. The image gets brighter as the ISO goes up.
This feature could give streamers with studio lighting (or Elgato’s own Key or Ring lights for the full ecosystem experience) a more professional way to adjust and customize their setup. Best of all, you can save your changes to the webcam’s flash memory as a new default setting. This way, once you’ve tweaked your footage to perfection, you won’t have to change it again.
Elgato Facecam review: Price and availability
The Elgato Facecam ($199.99) was an ambitious little webcam with advanced controls that ultimately let us down because of its high price, aggressive noise reduction filter, and lack of a built-in microphone. The $299.99 Elgato Facecam Pro tries to fix (some of) these flaws.
It has a wider lens with a variable focus and a higher 4K60 resolution, but it still doesn’t have a microphone. Also, it doesn’t do much to make up for the $100 price jump. The Logitech Streamcam ($169.99) and the Razer Kiyo Pro ($199.99) are still two of our top picks for general webcams.
If you mostly use your webcam for video calls and not for making videos, the Poly Studio P5 ($129.99) is a good choice because it is affordable and has a good microphone.
Elgato Facecam review: Final words
The Elgato Facecam is expensive, but its features (or lack thereof) make it our top pick for streamers who want to upgrade from a less powerful webcam but aren’t ready to use a full professional camera setup yet. If you just want a good webcam for work or to talk to your family, the cost might not be worth it, especially if you don’t already have a dedicated USB microphone or headset.
FAQs
Is the Elgato Facecam worth it?
Elgato’s Facecam Pro may be exactly what you need if you’re a content creator who’s looking to produce videos with an increasingly high production value. It is one of the most high-end webcams you can buy because it comes with a sensor that is capable of capturing images at a resolution of 4K and at a frame rate of 60 frames per second; however, it will set you back $299.
Does Elgato Facecam have autofocus?
The all-powerful Camera Hub app allows you to make adjustments to shutter speed, ISO, white balance, and more. You can get a clear shot by using autofocus, or you can manually lock in the focus.
What is the range of Elgato Facecam?
Facecam has a fixed focus lens, eliminating common auto focus issues and keeping you in perfect focus within a range of 30 – 120 cm / 12 – 47 in from the camera. This lens is optimised for desktop setups, making Facecam ideal for video conferencing.
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