When I started streaming, I wanted to make sure I had the best equipment possible that my budget allowed. It can be quite overwhelming during the beginning stages of content creation, and figuring out things like equipment on your own can be daunting, so you’ll be relying on the opinions and reviews of others to find the perfect fit for your own setup and style. One of my first webcams was the Razer Kiyo, which I used for many months and had an overall great experience with. The Razer Kiyo X is Razer’s latest webcam to add to their family of streaming gear, and thanks to Razer ANZ I had the opportunity to check it out to see how it stacks up against other webcams on the market.
The Kiyo X retails at $139 and utilises a small and sleek matte black design that is perfect for any, laptop or desktop monitor, and its flexible mount is great to adjust to find your best angle. The mount is also collapsible which makes it nice and compact – handy for those who work on-the-go and need to take a webcam around with them. Not only is this camera great for streamers but also for anyone needing a portable webcam for those important video calls for work.
Compared to the previous Kiyo model, the Kiyo X doesn’t have an inbuilt ring light, something I am glad about as it just wasn’t strong enough to make a substantial difference to my image. The only grievance I had with my previous Kiyo was that the hinges the camera were fixed onto became a little loose after time, but the Kiyo X does seem to be sturdier, so this is worth keeping in mind if you intend on travelling with it and moving it around a lot.
One of the most important features for any piece of tech is just how intuitive it is, and thankfully the Kiyo X is incredibly easy to set up – simply plug the webcam in via USB and off you go. Before launching the camera in my OBS, I downloaded the Razer Synapse software from the Razer website – it’s a great companion application to use to play around with different settings like brightness, contrast, saturation and white balance. The application has a few default profiles you can use and adjust if you prefer or you can use and save your own custom settings instead. What’s great is that the settings that I adjusted in the Synapse application actually carried over when I added the Kiyo to my OBS set up for streaming.
The Razer Kiyo X is capable of full HD streaming, recording at 1080p with 30 frames per second, but if you prefer a smoother video over image quality, you can opt for 720p at 60 frames.
I do have to stress before going any further – for any new streamers, content creators or general users of any webcam – lighting is everything when it comes to the quality of your camera. Just using your study’s single room light alone will not be enough to provide image quality like the examples in this article, so I have used a good quality key light for the purpose of this review. Without sufficient lighting, everything in the frame is incredibly dark and hard to distinguish so I don’t recommend using the Kiyo (or any other webcam) without an appropriate lighting setup if you want the best results. I currently use the Elgato Key Light – alternatively you could use the Razer Ring Light or even a decent ring light from Amazon that provides adjustable brightness features.
The video quality that the Kiyo puts out is fantastic for the price. I compared it to my current webcam bought a couple of years ago for around $250 and it’s very similar in image quality. The autofocus feature works quite well and keeps me looking nice and sharp (literally), but the only adjustment I had to make was turning up the saturation to make the colours in the frame pop more. Apart from that, it was ready to rock and roll as soon as I went live.
Final Thoughts
For anyone looking for an easy-to-use webcam that produces good quality video footage at an affordable price, the Kiyo X is definitely a great option. Razer makes it incredibly easy to customise the settings of the camera to suit your own needs in any setting or environment with their companion software. This webcam should definitely be on any budding streamer’s Christmas list!
Review unit supplied by the manufacturer
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When Bianca isn’t rewatching the MCU films for the billionth time, she’s usually grinding out some competitive multiplayer games or sharing her backlog of single-player titles with her online audience. You can find her on Twitch as StormieStreams
