We’re all taking more video calls these days, thanks to the forced working from home environment with which we all find ourselves. Naturally, that means the prices of webcams have gone up – and supply has gone right down.
Fortunately, there’s other options available. One of those is the Razer Kiyo, a USB 2.0 webcam targeted at streamers with a ring light. It’s an interesting move by Razer, although you have to ask yourself what you really want from a webcam.
Retailing for $184.95 from the official Razer store and other local outlets, the Kiyo is basically the same 4 megapixel, USB 2.0 webcam you’ve seen in a ton of other products.
Where Razer have tried to differentiate the Kiyo is through software and slightly better design. The Kiyo has a large, flexible bottom base to attach to monitors, as well as a screw mount for use in tripods or gorillapods.
The main innovation is the addition of a soft ring light on the camera, which can be controlled by physically rotating the ring clockwise and counter-clockwise. It’s an interesting idea, although in practice it falls apart a little. Rotating the camera immediately shifts its position slightly, so you have to be careful when adjusting it.
I also had some issues with the review unit I was using. The Kiyo isn’t a new camera – it was first launched last year – but a couple of days of light usage, the ring light stopped fully functioning. Only two-thirds of the ring light would activate after being enabled. That rectified itself after plugging and unplugging the Kiyo a couple of times, although after a week the ring light once again stopped completely functioning.
For the most part, however, I used the Kiyo with the soft light disabled. There’s a good reason for this: a light bouncing off your face doesn’t look good on camera. Not having a light pointed directly in your line of sight is a lot less annoying when you’re trying to clutch in Overwatch or Valorant. And there’s the fact that webcam sensors are tiny as all hell, so you also won’t get that nice contrast from having a well-lit face against a darker background. The Elgato Key Light Air or the larger Key Light is a much better solution for that, but that’s a conversation for another article.
https://www.mwave.com.au/product/elgato-key-light-air-studio-led-panel-ac31190
Where the Kiyo comes into its own is for people who want that ease of use. The Synapse suite gives you a set of sliders for controlling the colour temperature, brightness, contrast, saturation and more. The default settings are reasonable, but the preview window works really well if you want finer customisation (especially on the colour) for different environments.
But here, too, the Kiyo has a problem. When looking at the preview window in Razer Synapse, the preview is actually vastly more cropped than what you get on camera.
Here’s the actual camera output as seen through OBS:
It’s a huge difference. I can’t understand why the full preview window isn’t displayed in Razer Synapse. If you’re going to make life easier for people, the preview should fully display the camera’s output. It just means you have to preview the feed through a second app (if not OBS or Xsplit, then something like Google Hangouts, Discord, Zoom and so on) to get things right.
It’s worth noting that the advanced settings in the Razer software is the same advanced video settings you’d get if you pulled them up in OBS, Xsplit or Windows. Synapse just makes it easier to see the effect of what you’re changing. There’s a slider for controlling the manual focus of the camera; the last thing anyone wants is a webcam constantly focusing in and out as your hands or different objects come into the frame.
Most importantly of all: you don’t need to have Synapse open (or even installed) for your custom Kiyo settings to apply in other programs. That’s a big problem that Logitech users have discovered, as some of their custom settings only work as long as their proprietary software is running in the background.
Beyond that, however, the Kiyo’s biggest flaw is that you’re still using a relatively aged webcam sensor. I’d prefer this over any other USB 2.0 webcam with the same amount of megapixels, because
the ease of use makes it vastly easier to have a nicer looking image. Razer’s premium on products doesn’t apply here either, because the Kiyo is an older product, and webcam prices have soared so much since the coronavirus pandemic began.
What you have to ask yourself is if a 4MP webcam is enough quality. You won’t get that nice bokeh effect that you would from a cheaper DSLR or mirrorless camera. The 4K cameras available on the market, like the 2017 Logitech Brio, will get you a sharper image and more flexibility than what the Kiyo can do.
If you want to see the Kiyo in action over a livestream, here’s the recording of me contributing to a recent stream from a Game On Aus community event a few weeks ago.
Those are pricer options, however, and at that point you need to think about what your use case actually is. If you are a gamer, who is working a lot from home – and liable to continue doing so – then the Kiyo makes a lot of sense over some of the older Logitech cameras floating around. A bit of manual tweaking with the auto focus will make the overall presentation a lot better.
But at the end of the day you’re still buying a 4MP webcam. If you’re buying it for gaming, you’re likely not going to be running it at 1080p anyway (because of the added strain that puts on your streaming PC). There’s nothing wrong with the Kiyo in that respect. It’s fine, it does the job well enough, but it’s not exactly a major step forward in webcams or streaming hardware. You’re paying about the same amount as what you’d get for other 1080p webcams in this bracket, and you’re getting largely the same hardware, so that’s all fine.
Is that really what Razer represents, though? And when will we see some actual innovation in webcams, improvements that don’t make people genuinely think about using their phone or an older camera as a better alternative?
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