Elgato Key Light Neo review — Pallid corpse, begone!

I’ve got everything from a Black Magic 6K Pro camera to the camera on my phone and everything in between, and there’s one thing that is certain, lighting makes the shot. Elgato has recently released an all white model of their key lights, dubbed the Elgato Key Light Neo, looking to solve this problem. Whether you create content, run a podcast, do Let’s Plays, or just need to not look like a pallid corpse who lives in a cave on a Zoom call, lighting is key. Let’s take a look at the Elgato Key Light Neo and see why the team is asking $99 for it.

I don’t normally start with price. Indeed, I normally end with that and the warranty (It’s two years, by the way), but this time around we’re going to let the tail wag the dog. What would you need this light for, at this price range, and what makes it different from the $30 ring light, or the $230 one from Lime? Well, it turns out, the answer is the use case.

If you do anything away from your desk where you record, then you know how hard it can be to get proper lighting into some spaces. Portable lighting can be cumbersome, involving C-stands, light diffusers, and then trying to figure out how to get a power strip nearby. Some of these light rings are capable of operating off of a USB connection, which can be helpful, so let’s tick that off the list, but there’s one other problem and to explain it best, we’re gonna take a trip to the dentist.

Medical equipment is shockingly expensive, and there’s a reason why. When a shadow can completely occlude something that could amount to a dangerous condition for the patient, they had to create lights that cast no shadows. Test this theory if you wish by putting your hand under one of these lights and be amazed that you probably didn’t notice this before. Now, obviously the Elgato Key Light Neo isn’t quite to that level, but unlike even the $230 ring lights out there, this is a key light. The difference is that you aren’t casting a ring of light at an object, instead lighting with a square of light that blankets the subject. The name gives you the clue – a ring light casts a ring of light (you still following?) and a key light…well, ok the analogy fell apart as it fills in the shadows, but you get the point. Cast through a diffuser like shockingly expensive studio light, this means that it evenly covers the area with even lighting. It means you don’t get hard edges, nobody has a giant ring light reflection in their eyeballs, and you aren’t getting hotspots on any reflective surface in the background.

The other big difference between a cheap light and a good one is the quality of light gradient. Turning on a hard incandescent light will certainly light up a room, but you’d be hard pressed to call that lighting “pleasant”. The difference between that and nice lighting is the warmth. Being able to change lighting to a different softer color allows you to properly blanket your face with light that doesn’t come across as unnatural or harsh. Instead, you have two settings at the press of a button – warm and cool, giving you 2900 – 7000 K of lighting. If those two aren’t working for you, you can use a dial at one of the edges to adjust across a gradient of warmth.

Before you raise the LED-powered torches when I say “let’s talk about the software for this device”, hear me out. When I unpacked the light from the box, it seemed to have some limited range to its warmth. Opening the Elgato Control Center app on my phone (there’s an app on PC as well) revealed that there was a firmware update for the device. As odd as that is to say, it pulled in that firmware update, patched, rebooted, and all of a sudden I had full access to the entire range of light. That’s not to say that this is an LED with 16 million colors, that’s not what this is for.

The Elgato team thought through their design when they planned out how the Key Light Neo clamps onto a laptop. There is a full hinge clamp with a lip edge and a rubberized portion to keep it in place. On the bottom is a standard hole for a tripod. The fact that the front of this clamp is transparent is the key differentiator. Because it’s clear, even if you clamp over the top of your camera, it’ll be able to see through and operate. That means you don’t have to clamp the light anywhere but in the center. I hadn’t thought about this for other cameras that clamp on, but now that I’ve seen what better looks like, everyone else better start doing this. Seriously, you don’t know you need something until somebody shows it to you, it seems.

When you do connect the device, it’ll be with one of the two included nylon braided cords – a USB-A and a USB-C, both of which are nylon braided cords, and thank the stars, not hard wired! This cord can then be spooled onto a little storage ring in the back.

There is a consideration around that cord choice. If you are using USB-A, your maximum brightness is 400 lm. Moving to USB-C that jumps to 700 lm. Using the 3A power supply jumps that up to 1000 lm. If you’ve got a spare USB-C port, 700 lm will work for the vast majority of use cases.

It’s been a full on journey to justify a C-note for a light, but perhaps you see your particular use case listed here. For me, I know that carrying this highly portable light to events and shows will solve a problem of poor lighting that has been persistent for years. Undoubtedly you can use this light with Elgato’s other Neo line of products, but it’s great that it works just as well without. Ultimately, It’s not just that this device provides light, it’s that it does so with a degree of quality. Justifying a $99 price point if you just need a basic light might be a challenge, but if you want to do so with some level of cleanliness goes a long way.

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