The result is lights that are both excellent at night while still being soft. The Key Light and Key Light Air are more than bright enough to stream and record YouTube videos with. The Key Light and Key Light Air are both much larger and designed for a studio environment. If you never plan to create content away from your setup then they may still be a more viable option, but the flexibility the Mini offers while maintaining similar performance, well it's hard to ignore. Elgato Key Light Mini: Should you buy it? You should buy this if ... To be clear, this doesn't excuse not having buttons, but it's a start. Hope this helps both of you with this problem I had! Comparison: Key Light Air on the left, and the Key Light Mini on the right. (Image credit: Future/Alex Berry)

For those with a more static setup, the Key Light Mini has less to offer compared to other options. Don’t get me wrong, it’s more than up to the job but it loses its price advantage compared to traditional the best ring lights or even Elgato’s own Key Light Air once you factor in a stand. Stands, mounts, and tripods: Lighting placement is super important, so we recommend key lights with stands that allow for adjustments to the tilt, height, and rotation of the light. Depending on how you intend to use your key light, however, compact clip mounts or desk stands may be preferable over tripods. The advantage of tripods, however, is that they're often tall enough to be placed on the floor, and they can collapse down for travel. DETAILS: Look I have no clue why this is the fix, but it is. Even with the above RIP setting turned on, I kept resetting the KLA and affiliating it with my network using AirPort Utility on my Mac. The router showed that it was connected, but Control Center could not find it. I noticed that Control Center was available for iOS, so I installed it on my iPhone. I followed the instructions on the app to add a new device using the iOS Settings->WiFi process that looks pretty similar to the MacOS->Airport Utility process, and it worked. Brightness: There's no hard-and-fast answer for how bright your light should be, since the total illumination of your space is determined by other light fixtures, natural light, and the distance the subject is from the source. That's why we recommend key lights with an adjustable brightness, so you don't have to keep shifting the light's distance to find the sweet spot. We typically choose options with a maximum brightness of at least 1,000 Lumens, which should be sufficient to illuminate an entire desk space. You only need to pair Key Light once. After that, it will be connected to your network, even after you turn it off and on again many times. Then, you can control it via software.

Teeny tiny but shining oh so bright.

The Key Light Mini is arguably the most attractive of all Elgato's Key Light products. It's no longer just for in-studio content creation, with the addition of a battery and a smaller size making it something that any type of content creator can use.

I tried the whole reset thing again tonight, and the same thing happened. I would use Airport Utility on my Mac to try to set it up. The Mac kept saying it would either succeed or it would say "an unexpected error has occurred." Nevertheless, same result: no KLA on my Control Center. The Key Light Ring was working though. Weird right? Sometimes blogging means lots of long form essays that take weeks to write and drop lots of wisdom.

Conclusions

But no included stand is surprisingly inconvenient. I have a spare mini tripod I could use with it, but to use this in any kind of studio environment you're going to have to invest in additional gear. I am using MacOS Big Sur on the latest build -- if you're a PC user, I'm not sure how this ports to Windows Enter the name of your WiFi network. This needs to match the network name exactly including upper and lowercase letters and spaces.

Alright folks. I was pretty pissed of with Elgato's frankly lame support on connection issues with the Key Light Air (let's called it KLA to shorten things), but I think I have it worked out. There are tons of different options to consider, but we know what to look for. Our team of professional photographers, filmmakers, and tech gurus have years of experience with lighting. Through trial and error, we've learned what's important when it comes to lighting a set, whether it be a massive film shoot or a bedroom streaming setup. That's why the best key lights are versatile and adaptable. BTW, I also found this lovely blog post from Trevor Sullivan where he shows the Elgato Key Light internal API (on /elgato/lights) and a PowerShell Module that lets you change the Elgato Key light with script. If Key Light does not appear when trying to control or pair via Control Center or phone, the steps in this article can help:There are no knobs to control the brightness or the color temperature, so you'll have to install an app called Elgato Control Center. It was pretty annoying to set up the first (and second and third) time. Whenever you move shooting locations and/or change your internet it’s a pain to reset both lights and resync them.

Make a copy of the settings.xml in that folder so you don't blame me with this whole affair goes horribly wrong. These steps can be used to manually pair an Elgato Wi-fi lighting product if other methods are not working correctly. These steps can be used on a desktop PC even if it used a hardwired connection as along as a built-in or add-in Wi-Fi card is connected. Ring lights are a type of key light. In this article, we review key lights with solid panels. Because they're more traditional, we refer to these simply as "key lights." There truly isn't much to dislike about the Key Light Mini, but there are a couple of pointers that do bring the whole experience down a touch. The first is the price, just as has been a score against every other Key Light from Elgato.The Elgato Key Light gets quite tall. I’m 5’8” and the Elgato Key Light was just a few inches shorter than me. However, you can't put the Key Light on the floor without buying a separate base. The most obvious alternative is the excellent Lume Cube Panel GO, which is brighter at 1,000 lumens (versus 800 of the Elgato Key Light Mini) but with less color range (3200 to 5600K vs. 2900-7000K). The Lume Cube Panel GO battery is just 2,470 mAh versus the larger 4,000 mAh in the Elgato Key Light Mini, although battery life is 90 minutes at 100%, versus 120 minutes for the (dimmer) Elgato Key Light Mini.