Elgato continues their line of lighting products designed for the at-home streamer with the Elgato Light Strip, their take on RGBW lights. At a price of $60 USD, these offer competition with leading competitors like Philips, whose light strip runs $80. So let's take a look at how Elgato stacks up.
What Comes in the box
The light strip itself runs a length of 78.74 inches, offers a brightness of up to 2000 lumens and the color range of 3500 - 6500 K. For comparison, Philip's light strips run the same length, has a lower lumen output of 1600, but offer a wider color range of 2000 - 6500 K. In short, Elgato offers a bit less color range but is brighter than the Philips.
Setup
The setup is pretty straightforward. Simply apply your light where you want it. I went with placing it behind my computer desk, and then you'll need to install the Elgato control center app, either on your phone or computer. Sync the lights to your wifi and you're good to go. I did encounter an issue where after setting up the lights and the control center on my windows desktop would keep crashing every time I pulled it up. But after a fresh reinstall, I haven't had any issues.
I prefer controlling them on my phone anyways because you can save six sets of colors as favorites for easy switching, which you can't do on the desktop version. However, if you happen to own a stream deck, you can program that to work with your light strips. You can set up a power button, color presets, and adjust brightness and temp. It's pretty neat but kind of a bummer that you need the stream deck if you want to set up presets using your desktop. At least the phone app is still an option.
Flicker-Free
One of the big selling points of these lights is that they are flicker-free. Typically LED lights can flicker when shown on camera and you'll need to adjust your shutter speed to reduce this. You can see this happening here with the Philips light strip. Meanwhile, Elgato's do not. This makes these a better choice if you're using these lights to decorate a studio or the background of your streaming setup
Outro
If you're someone like me that likes decorating your space with RGB lights, the Elgato Light Strip is a pretty easy recommendation from me. They are good quality, easy setup, and brighter than the offering from their main competitor Philips, in addition to being $20 cheaper. If you're looking for some LED strips, I would definitely consider these.