Is the Elgato Teleprompter Worth It? Honest Review & Real-World Use

Before we get into it, just a heads-up: this isn’t a review, even though that’s the category I’ve placed this post under. I didn’t relaly know what else to classify this as, but it strictly speaking isn’t a review, ok? It’s simply my experience after using the Elgato Teleprompter just a couple of days at this point.

I honestly don’t have too many Elgato products overall. I like their capture cards; I have a USB one the 60s+ and I also have their 4K60 Pro MK.2 in my gaming PC. I wasn’t really ever interested in a lot of their other products. This giant streamdeck that you can mount under your desk seems great for productivity, but for live streaming I never really needed anything and most of their other products, I usually always had something else in mind, which are mostly better products and cheaper, as Elgato has really inflated price tags, that never really made a lot of sense to me, but if people see the value proposition as accurate, then who am I to critique… if you’re sitting in a house made of glass, shouldn’t be throwing stones, shouldn’t be throwing stones after all.

As for pricing, I’ve grabbed one on a Black Friday deal for just under 230€, which came with a Keylight Mini, which I didn’t need. I have two RGB lights that serve the exact same purpose, have more functions, are a lot more customisable and are built a lot better as well. The prompter plus the light was still significantly cheaper than just buying the prompter by itself outside of the Black Friday offer, so why not? It also came with a cold shoe, which I probably didn’t use as intended, but without it, I would have needed to buy a new tripod first, so, just as well.

Why I Upgraded to the Elgato Teleprompter

This Elgato Teleprompter wasn’t an impulse purchase though, it’s a straight upgrade after having used an old iPhone 7 Plus that I still had lying around as a teleprompter for several years now. It did work fine and I could control the Teleprompter app I was using with an old DualShock 4 I had lying around also, which is kinda cool too. But the biggest issue I had was maintaining eye contact with the lens of the camera while I was reading off the phone’s screen. I also liked the camera to be quite far away if I am recording while standing due to the max height of my tripods, as it would otherwise look off, if my eyes are too close to the lens, but not properly locking on to it. While the distance didn’t solve the issue, it did help mask a lot of it, but of course also introduced a separate set of challenges to work around.

The font size on the teleprompter app on my old phone, was one such hurdle. I had to increase the font size by quite a bit. Which then meant that there were only five to ten words on screen at any given time, which can create issues with your delivery, emphasis, pacing and just keeping a cool head when you have to repeat the same section for the 20th time because you cannot properly pronounce the word “required”, for some strange reason. Also, long words or combinations of words that show up can cause issues if they are broken up in weird spots, which again, will cause issues with your delivery. Most importantly though it is about maintaining eye contact. I needed a separate tripod to mount the phone and position it JUST under the lens of the camera, so that the phone itself wouldn’t show up in the recording, but also that the text is high enough, that it would still at least kind of look like I am looking directly into the lens.

These are all things that you just accept. It’s a DIY approach and it comes with the usual DIY headaches. For the types of videos that I make, which are mostly scripted apart from the odd VLOG I make, I really like using a prompter and felt it was at least a warranted expenditure given for how long I’ve been winging it and the fact of how good the Black Friday deal actually was.

Voice Control & Real-World Performance: Is It Worth It?

I no longer need my DualShock 4 or any other type of remote control, as the Elgato Teleprompter has a voice synchronisation feature. Which isn’t perfect, sometimes it’s working great, other times, you feel like you’re fighting against it. I found that my natural speed, because this is not how I speak in real life, I speak very fast and coupled with the fact that I am obviously not a native speaker, that my grammar is all sorts of messed up and that at that speed, proper enunciation might fall by the wayside as well, it can get a little frustrating if you don’t adapt to the tool, at least to a certain degree. So while the Elgato Teleprompter’s voice sync doesn’t work exactly how I imagined it would, it still does speed up the process quite a bit. When it does work and what I find most impressive, it lets you jump back simply by reading a previous line and it just knows where you are in the script, even if you are reading them out of order. It really is magical WHEN it works.

I usually try to “break” everything as soon as I get it, just like with the M4 Max, to see where the limits are but in this case I haven’t tested to see what would happen if you had the same line in the text several times for example. Which instance would the Elgato Teleprompter choose? How would it know to jump to the one you were thinking of? Would it jump to the next instance? The previous one? Do I care? Not really to be honest, but I still have those questions in the back of my mind. But again, this is not a review, so unless this is naturally occurring in one of my scripts at some point, I don’t have any plans to actually go out of my way to test it.

One downside is that without a computer, you can’t really use the thing by itself it seems. That’s mostly because it’s seen as a separate monitor, rather than a dedicated teleprompting device. This can be especially useful for meetings in Microsoft Teams, or a job interview for instance, you can actually keep eye contact without straining yourself to do so. It takes a lot of effort to avoid looking at the screen and instead focus on the lens as you should, but with this, you’re doing both at the same time, which is really cool. It’s not worth the price, just for that though, not even with that Black Friday deal, but it is another use case if you already have it.

If you want to use it further away from your computer, you’ll just have to use a really long USB-C Thunderbolt cable. Thankfully I already had quite a few lying around and didn’t need to buy those again. That it needs to be connected at all times during operation is something to consider though.

The beauty of the Teleprompter app on my old phone was that it’s still tied to my Apple ID, which means everything syncs automatically, so I can add my script to the app through my computer, or my actual phone and it will just sync up and be ready to roll. This prep work on the Elgato Teleprompter is neither better nor worse, but it is different. That’s just prep though, even with the caveat of having to use a computer hooked up to it, it’s a million times better than the hoops I had to jump through prior to this. I think it was always obvious that I was reading off a script for almost everything, so if you’re going to watch the video, it’s at the top of this post, you tell me if it does look more natural or not. It will still take practice of course but so far I am really liking it. As per usual, I will try to give an update after a few months to a year to see if my opinions have changed, if I am still using it, if it broke down, whatever it is, I will let you know then. See you next time.