Elgato HD 60 S – Portable And Powerful Video Capture Card

With the HD60S, Elgato has introduced a powerful USB-C Video Capture Card that makes it easy to get all sorts of video streams into your system for either recording or streaming high-quality video content.
With recent Updates, it has even become possible to use your Elgato streams as webcam input to be used in video communication, like Skype, Discord, and more...
This might make the Elgato HD60S one of the most powerful video capturing devices for Windows users.
Game_Capture_HD60_S_Solution_02
With the HD60S, Elgato has introduced a powerful USB-C Video Capture Card that makes it easy to get all sorts of video streams into your system for either recording or streaming high-quality video content.
With recent Updates, it has even become possible to use your Elgato streams as webcam input to be used in video communication, like Skype, Discord, and more...
This might make the Elgato HD60S one of the most powerful video capturing devices for Windows users.

The Elgato HD 60S SPECS

  • USB 3.0 Interface (up to 40Mbps for lag free gaming experience)
  • HDMI Input up to 1080p 60fps
  • HDMI Out (Pass-through)
  • 3.5mm Audio Input jack

Additional Features:

  • unlimited capture
  • flashback recording
  • Software allows to stream to common video streaming platforms, manage audio and commentary and usage of graphics overlays

What’s In The Box?

After opening the well-designed package, You are immediately presented with the semi-matte device and on the other side of the package has the quick start guide printed right on the package. Which is Handy!

The USB3 and HDMI cables, as well as an ‘Elgato Gaming’ Sticker, are hidden but you will get there with one flip.

Installing Driver and Software

As stated on the package’s quick start guide, I went straight for the Elgato’s website to download the driverdriver and the provided software package. The installation process is simple, easy and hassle free. It just takes just a few minutes of your time, then, perform a reboot when asked to do so. Done!

Setting Up The Device

As for setup, this is as straight as simple as it gets. I was just testing with my Canon G5x (knowing it was set to capture 1080p and 59fps). You go HDMI out to HDMI in on the device, connect the USB cable to your computer and (if you don’t need pass-through to output your signal to another screen) YOU ARE ALREADY DONE!. Instantly got a signal in OBS!

Surely you can use the Elgato software to stream but I often record from a camera and am super happy with the setup I use with OBS.

After the trouble I went through with another device, this quickly raised my level of satisfaction and I was keen on exploring all the HD60S’s features.

The Software

The Elgato streaming software is pretty intuitive. Its main features are:

  • live streaming options
  • game audio
  • live commentary
  • sound capture
  • video tagging
  • streaming platform
  • graphics overlays
  • big streaming preview window

After checking all the settings and advanced features in the hardware setup, I was pretty amazed by what you can actually change. To my surprise, there is even an option to change the device’s color profile from a standard (multimedia purposes) to an enhanced color profile, which is more flat-looking but preserves more of the details in shadows and highlights. For capturing a camera signal, this is perfect!

What’s missing?

Initially, I was looking for a device allowing me to stream and to use a better camera for my skype sessions. Unfortunately, the Elgato does not register as a video device to use with Skype. After doing some more research on this topic, I found Skype only taking uncompressed video signals. And as the Elgato is meant to deliver compressed H.264 video, ready for streaming. This is in the nature of this concept to not deliver the signal for skype. The very expensive Magewell Dongle can do it but it really is over most people’s budget.

A bit of a downside is, that the HD 60s does NOT have an encoder running on the device itself, so It will be compressed by using your graphics card. For Me, running a two graphics card system, this is not an issue at all as either the Nvidia Quadro or the Nvidia GeForce 950 manage gaming and video compression at the same time quite well.

If you rely on the codec, however, for eg. when playing on the same computer that you are streaming from, you might want to consider purchasing the PCI express version which has a hardware encoder.

Conclusions

After all the Elgato HD 60s performs perfectly in the field it was built for. Whether you are a gamer or want to stream video from a quality camera, you can do so without giving up on mobility or running into any latency issues.

I cannot but speak highly enough of this device. Setup was quick and easy and so far have not run into any issues while testing all sorts scenarios I might use this device for.

THUMBS UP!

Daniel
Daniel
I have a background as a touring musician, and in the tech industry, working in tech support for internationally operating brands. When I was a child, I started opening up every device I could get my hands on. Later, this lead to me building my own computers out of other people's trash computers. Today, I still like tech and gear, talking about it, and sharing my knowledge.
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