Elgato Control Center

This app has great cohesive design language and is a snap to use as soon as the devices connect but that’s the thing, Elgato Lights need this app to work with all their features unless there’s a remote or in the case of the mini on-device controls. But out of the box this app is required. For that reason I wish Elgato lights worked with HomeKit & the Home app for easier use and automation. This app doesn’t utilize automation which would make it perfect for me if the temperature of the lights could change with the time of day or if I could simply tell Siri to turn them on. I’m not sure if all that is a hardware level issue but the app works well to change the lights and turn them off and on.

Version 1.3.0 solves the problems I ran into with the previous version, and has been working reliable on both iOS and Mac. Original review: I’ve had the same issue in both the iOS and Mac version of this app: the setup works fine and I can see the light is connected to my Wi-Fi network, but it never shows up in the app. At one point I got the light to show up briefly on my iPad today, after restarting it. During that brief time the app worked okay, though the brightness slider jumped around a bit when moving it. The Windows version of the app works fine. I was able to use that to update the firmware on the light, but that didn’t help with the problem on iOS and Mac. (Oddly I did not have any issues with Elgato’s newer Ring Light, aside from it being too large for my setup.)

This app connects to multiple Key Lights and provides simple sliders for brightness and color temperature. The light hardware itself works great, but considering how expensive the lights are, this disappointing app falls far short of what it should be able to do. A Link Accessory Controls setting lets you adjust all lights by moving one slider, but only sets all lights to the same value; after I set up an ideal lighting ratio between left and right Key Lights, dragging one slider did not preserve the ratio but set them both to the same value. There’s no way to save presets, so if you want to remember one or more light setups, you must write down the slider positions and apply them by hand…as if computers didn’t exist! Then I thought about automating the lights with something else, but the lights have no web browser access, no Siri Shortcuts support, and while HomeKit lighting scenes are increasingly popular with streamers, Key Lights do not support HomeKit (as of January 2021). Also, there appears to be no way to secure the lights on the network; it seems like they could be hijacked by anyone on the same LAN using the same app. The app creates the impression that it’s been crippled to make us all go buy StreamDecks to automate these lights, but we are not all going to do that. Corsair needs to step up; update the firmware and app for compatibility with HomeKit and other current automation workflows, making the software realize the potential of the expensive hardware. (This is a 2021 edit of my original 2019 review; since then I removed a star because over that time, no feature updates have addressed its shortcomings.)