Elgato Facecam 4K, 4K60 Studio Webcam, DSLR-Like Control

Why it's worth it

The Facecam 4K hands OBS an uncompressed 4K60 image and gives you shutter, ISO and white balance the way a real camera does. Lock your settings once, save them to the camera, and your face looks the same on every stream.

The Facecam 4K sends your encoder a clean, uncompressed picture, and that's the whole point. Most webcams squash the video before it ever reaches OBS, which bakes in mush you can't undo later. This one passes raw frames at 4K and 60 per second. Downscale that to 1080p for Twitch and your face comes out sharper than any native 1080p camera manages. It's the gap between a stream that looks fine and one that looks produced.

The controls are the other reason to buy it. Camera Hub gives you shutter speed, ISO, white balance and a focus area you draw yourself, like you would on a mirrorless body. You can lock all of it so your skin tone doesn't shift when someone opens a blind behind you mid-stream. The camera then writes those settings to onboard memory, so moving to another PC doesn't mean starting over.

From our review of 10 streaming webcams, by Ben Carter, Tech Editor

What we like

• +The Facecam 4K sends your encoder a clean, uncompressed picture, and that's the whole point
• +The controls are the other reason to buy it
• +The Sony STARVIS 2 sensor and f/2.8 lens do the heavy lifting on detail
• +It also fits a working desk

What to know

• –There's no microphone in it
• –It's also hungry for light