Elgato 4K60 S+ Review [4K 60 FPS HDR USB Capture Card]
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The Elgato 4K60 S+ is a portable capture card that connects by USB 3.0 and is $400 retail at the time of this writing (Amazon).
-Specifications
-Inside the box
-Performance
-Verdict
Specifications
-external capture card that connects through a USB 3.0 slot
-can record standalone with no PC using a U3 V30 SD card
-supports passthrough and capture of 4K 60 FPS in HDR
-maximum passthrough and capture is 60 FPS. No support for higher frame rates.
-supports passthrough and capture of 1080p and 720p but NOT 1440p
-works with both NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards due to its built-in HEVC encoder
Inside the box
-the capture card itself
-HDMI 2.0 cable
-two USB type C to 3.0 male cables
-a power brick with 4 different adapters
-instruction booklet
Headset audio can be recorded with the help of Elgato Chat Link
A USB type C to type C cable can be used instead of the type C to 3.0 cable provided.
Performance
The Elgato 4K60 S+ is a very inconsistent capture card. I’ll start with my standalone SD card experience. As specified by Elgato’s website, the SD card I used was rated U3 V30. The card automatically detects if HDR footage is coming in and adjusts accordingly. I must say, when it works as intended, the footage is incredible.
Unfortunately, this flawless footage was not always the result. One of the other files on my SD card was just a corrupted looking green blur. I also recorded in Elgato’s 4K Capture Utility (ver 1.7.2). As of this writing, that program still has massive issues. Again, some of the footage looked excellent. However, one of my 5 minute captures of Horizon Zero Dawn was somehow mashed into 20 seconds of sped up mush with the file seeming to try to stack all the frames on top of each other. There was also random pixelation in certain frames of otherwise decent footage. Sometimes the game’s audio desynced from the video, but I mainly was able to isolate that issue to pushing the bitrate too high. More on hardware limitations shortly…
What’s going on here?
This is the map… and a battle in the same frame… or something.
Latency is another of this card’s weak points. It’s trying to push 4K 60 FPS through a USB 3.0 connection. The result is a heavily delayed image coming to your preview window. The passthrough is lagless, so it doesn’t affect your gaming experience. This still negatively affects content creators since the gameplay will be desynced from other media sources like microphones or webcams. I didn’t do systematic testing, but it felt like an entire half second of delay. (Elgato says it’s about 250 ms) To mitigate this, you have to add render delay filters to you mic and webcam in OBS. How much delay exactly? Trial and error till it sounds about right. Yep… it’s as bad as it sounds.
In contrast with these issues, the 4K60 S+ does have two things going for it. First, the footage recorded in OBS was pixelation and corruption free. Then again, the problem with that is you can no longer record in HDR since OBS does not currently support HDR as of this writing. Even so, this shows there’s issues with Elgato’s 4K Capture Utility which means it can potentially be fixed in an update. Though, they’ve been saying they’ll fix it since the device launched.
The second bright spot of Elgato’s capture card is it works with both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs. This is something most people take for granted, unless you’re team red like me. In that case, that’s never something to be taken for granted, as I learned the hard way with the 4K60 Pro.
Enabling 4K 60 FPS HDR just worked. No questions asked, no additional setup. The same can’t be said for the other 4K capture cards I tested.
Verdict
I do NOT recommend the Elgato 4K60 S+. Not in its current state for sure, but maybe not ever considering its unpredictability and giant price tag. Imagine taking it to a local tournament to record off-stream matches and getting home to realize half the footage was ruined. Well if you get this card, you won’t have to imagine!
Portability is sadly out the question for now, so I would suggest looking into internal capture cards such as the AVerMedia Live Gamer 4K (review) or Elgato’s own 4K60 Pro (review coming soon) which performed far better than the 4K60 S+.
Elgato 4K60 S+: https://amzn.to/34sflSt
