Elgato Facecam Review – A Webcam That Doesn’t Suck

Elgato made a webcam – so you know that means two things: It’s probably going to be good, but it’s not going to be cheap.

At CES 2020 when visiting the Elgato booth, I pulled the GM of Elgato along with other familiar faces aside and told them that while the Wave was a really cool thing coming soon and the other stuff they showed off were neat, they really needed to make a webcam. I said it needed 3 things: Uncompressed video (no reliance on MJPEG or onboard H264), manual control over the REAL camera settings for the webcam much like a DSLR or mirrorless camera, and for those settings to persist past reboot. Were my requests heard?

For disclosure, as with many of the products I review, Elgato sent the Facecam for review, but they’re not seeing this review before it’s posted, not sponsoring this video, anything like that.

Physically, it’s a webcam. The look resembles a security camera or perhaps the protagonist from ULTRAKILL. A surprisingly robust monitor mount is included pre-attached to the webcam, but it can be removed, revealing a quarter-twenty tap – giving you the freedom to mount it in any way you want. Tripods, friction arms, Elgato’s own multi-mount, or perhaps their new Wave Mic Arms to get a super-specific angle – the possibilities are endless.

Internally, we’re looking at an unspecified Sony STARVIS CMOS sensor, much like most webcams being released this year, what they’re calling the “Elgato Prime Lens” which appears to be a CS-mount style lens based on what they’ve shown us, onboard memory, and a complete lack of microphone.

Yes, Elgato has decided that streamers never use webcam microphones anyway and thus they’re not worth the extra parts, R&D, and software costs. I don’t entirely disagree, but this may limit Facecam’s usefulness for those wanting to use it for video conferencing or super quick calls.

There’s also a beefy heatsink to keep the sensors and processing chips nice and cool.

There’s a big superpower here that differentiates this webcam from its competition: The “Advanced Image Engine.” This processor provides average and center-weighted exposure metering for some of the best auto-exposure I’ve seen in a webcam, manual settings, de-mosaicing, color correction, impressive auto white balancing, lens distortion correction, etc.

The “Elgato Prime Lens” itself is an equivalent focal length of 24mm – the same as I have mounted on my Sony a7c a-cam, as it’s the perfect focal length for a webcam – with an aperture of f/2.4. This provides a nice wide maximum Field of View of 82 degrees, but WITHOUT any distortion.

(You may remember from my Razer Kiyo Pro review that the widest FOV had some SERIOUS fisheye effect going on, distorting walls, doors, and other straight lines in the background – but this is not the case here. Between the lens selection and onboard lens correction processing, you have a wonderfully linear presentation with minimal distortion.)

There is one sacrifice with the lens setup, or a boon depending on your preferences: This is a fixed-focus camera. This means there is no autofocus, focus is locked in one position. However, the focus distance is tuned to be more optimized for sitting close to the camera. This means that from 12 inches off the lens to about 47 inches (or about 4 feet), you should appear “in focus.” This is a big deal, as many have found with the AverMedia PW513 or other fixed focus cameras we’ve looked at, that the focus distance is a little too far out, so sitting close to the camera makes you appear out of focus.

Video is transmitted in uncompressed UYVY, by the way, meaning it’s got no compression artifacts, is low latency, and uses minimal CPU resources to decode.

Do you still want a webcam, or have you moved on? pic.twitter.com/OJ0FYE2SSK

— Addie (@EposVox) July 15, 2021

My favorite super-power is something that I’ve made multiple videos asking Logitech and other webcam manufacturers to act on over the years: the “Camera Hub” software.

Camera hub is your, well, hub for managing the camera’s settings. And I’m not talking the generic UVC controls for gain, exposure, and things that don’t get you results you want. I’m talking Shutter Speed, ISO, white balance measured in color temperature. Real settings.

You can manage multiple Facecams, adjust zoom or field of view, tweak contrast, saturation, and sharpness, sure. But the neat trick is exposure. No more are you just blindly adjusting “exposure”, “brightness” and “gain” sliders, but they’ve instead set up a proper “Shutter Speed” and “ISO” section, at least in manual mode.

If you use auto exposure you can choose to expose for the average of the whole frame, or use center-weighted for it to measure exposure based upon an assumed subject in the center of the frame. Then you can tweak exposure compensation a bit from there.

Even under my bright Aputure key lights, I found the auto exposure to work incredibly well, much better than most webcams I’ve used which typically make me look like I’m lit by the sun.

I do recommend setting it to manual exposure for streaming, however, as being able to manually set the shutter speed to 1/125 for 60fps means you get proper, smooth, 60fps motion without ghosting, too much motion blur, or duplicated frames as many webcams produce.

Keep in mind that like a real camera, bumping up the shutter speed may expose some of your LED lights as flickering or refreshing on-camera. This is a huge problem for some keyboards, Philips Hue lights, or generic LED strips – and why it’s so important to buy flicker-free lights for video production.

White balance is the only slight disappointment at the moment. You get a color temperature slider, which is great, and auto white balance performs nicely – but there’s still no tint.