Razer Kiyo Pro Ultra

Verdict

The Razer Kiyo Pro Ultra is an excellent streaming webcam. It offers some extremely detailed output alongside sublime build quality and reasonable software. It’s easy to use and there are thoughtful touches to make it a brilliant webcam for content creators. It does come with a high price and middling low-light performance though.

Introduction

The Razer Kiyo Ultra is one hell of a webcam, priced highly, and is a compelling choice for content creators who want the pinnacle of what a webcam in the 2020s is all about.

At £299.99/$299.99, it’s the most expensive 4K webcam I’ve tested and one that sits above recent competitors including the Logitech MX Brio and HP 960 4K Streaming Webcam. Both of those have been top performers in recent months, so Razer’s latest and greatest has a lot to live up to.

I’ve tested the Kiyo Pro Ultra for the last few weeks to see how it stacks up in an increasingly competitive market to see if it’s one of the best webcams we’ve tested. Here are my findings.

Design and Features

• Large and sturdy chassis
• Thoughtful privacy options
• Convenient software control

Unlike the boxier looks of the competition, the Kiyo Pro Ultra offers a circular chassis, whose looks are more akin to a mirrorless camera lens both in size and shape. In comparing it with the 15-45mm kit lens of my Canon M50, there isn’t much difference. This means that the Kiyo Pro Ultra is quite a big and bulky webcam compared to the competition, but it remains an especially well-made option that also looks excellent.

The Kiyo Pro Ultra is quite a hefty bit of kit and carries a lot of presence atop my monitor. It attached reasonably easily to my MSI MPG 321URX, but had some trouble attaching to my 16-inch MacBook Pro, given the heft of the webcam. This is a webcam designed primarily for desktop use, and fitting it to a laptop isn’t the easiest, or most practical solution. Nonetheless, for use with a proper monitor, the Kiyo Pro Ultra works well.

On the base of the webcam’s mount is a standard tripod thread mount if you want to mount it elsewhere, even if Razer hasn’t included a tripod in the box. The Kiyo Pro Ultra also comes with some other thoughtful touches, including an integrated privacy shutter, which can be closed with a twist of the lens. For extra protection from prying eyes, Razer also bundles a rubber cover in the box, which fits well over the front of the Kiyo Pro Ultra.

The Kiyo Pro Ultra can work plug and play, although to get the most out of it, you will need to install Razer’s Synapse 3 suite, the brand’s usual companion for peripherals and such. The main Camera tab allows you to manually set the webcam’s pan and tilt, as well as manually zoom in. You can also manually adjust the exposure, f-stop and ISO, or leave it to be done automatically. These settings can be saved to one of five presets, and then called up with a shortcut key that can be mapped to your keyboard.

The next tab along, Processing, offers the choice of resolution and frame rate, with everything from 4K/30fps down to 720p/60fps supported in the preview window. You can also enable more compensatory settings for low light, lens distortion and dynamic noise reduction, as well as enabling HDR. The final tab, labelled Image, allows for granular control of brightness, contrast and saturation, as well as white balance. There are also a range of presets relating to colour temperature, and you can also add a watermark if needed.

Synapse 3 isn’t a bad piece of software by any means, but it isn’t the most responsive when compared to options from Logitech and HP. In addition, as much as the controls and customisation options here are good, the Kiyo Pro Ultra is missing other handy features such as Auto Framing. For a webcam at this price, I would have expected it to be present, especially considering it’s on HP’s option which costs nearly £100 less.

Performance and Video Quality

• Highly detailed output
• Middling low-light performance
• Internal microphone sounds thin

The Kiyo Pro Ultra’s output at 4K/30fps was some of the best I’ve seen on any webcam, with bright and vivid images that had lots of detail. In environments with good lighting, the Kiyo Pro ultra excelled on its default, out-of-the-box settings, although its autofocus was a little slow to focus on my face. Apart from that, this is a great webcam for streamers who want the best output possible, and if you need more motion, then it also has the option to drop down to a Full HD resolution at 60fps.

Low light performance is decent too, with the Kiyo Pro Ultra retaining a lot of detail when I closed my curtains, although there was a tendency for it to overcompensate in some instances in terms of exposure. The images can look a little noisy, but the Kiyo Pro Ultra offers enough detail to negate the noise to a degree. However, the Logitech MX Brio offered much better low-light performance with less exposure and more of a natural presentation.

If there’s a low point for the Kiyo Pro Ultra, it’s the webcam’s microphone. As with other microphones on webcams, it’s not the best, sounding quite thin while offering reasonably clear communication. It is likely to be fine for conferencing, but for the streaming workloads that this webcam is arguably designed for, you’d be better off sacrificing some money on your webcam in the name of better audio.

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