Review: Razer’s Key Light Chroma brings RGB to your Twitch streams

Razer’s product family has been expanding at a pretty fantastic rate recently. While the core of the company’s focus remains gaming, adjacent areas such as content creation are now a staple of the Razer lineup.

Among the recent batch of creator-focused accessories is the Razer Key Light Chroma. Yes, Elgato also does a key light and in some regards it’s quite similar to this one. But as you might expect, Razer rarely follows the crowd, instead choosing to muscle its way in with its own take.

That’s precisely what the Key Light Chroma is. There are only so many ways you can make a light panel like this, but naturally, Razer added one signature feature that helps it stand out from the rest.

Razer Key Light Chroma: Price, availability, and specs

The Razer Key Light Chroma is available to order now from Razer’s own store. It’ll cost you $300 but for that, you get the light panel, a power supply, and all the mounting hardware you will need.

There’s not a lot to these things. After all, it’s a light panel, it makes things brighter. And as with the competing products from Elgato, it’s incredibly well made, space-efficient thanks to a slim design and an included desk clamp, and it has wireless connectivity.

But the Razer Key Light Chroma has, as the name implies, a party piece that competing products so far do not: RGB. Razer has, naturally, included full Chroma support for this latest product and that means a space-saving, bright, wireless LED light panel with a built-in diffuser that can illuminate your face or your content in more colors than you’ll truly ever need.

Of course, there’s more to Chroma than just RGB. It’s an entire ecosystem and that means the Key Light Chroma can integrate with any other Chroma-enabled devices you have. For example, if you have Nanoleaf lights already in your studio environment linked up to Chroma, you can now synchronize these and the Key Light Chroma together. You can have them all interacting with your stream or your games, or just set them to whatever wild color you wish.

You can also just use the Chroma as a plain white illuminator to improve your stream lighting. It’s entirely up to you, but the advantage to the Key Light Chroma over a competitor is that additional freedom. It’s no longer just about lighting you up; you have complete creative control. You can also use the Key Light Chroma vertically as well as horizontally thanks to a tripod mount on each edge.

And being a Chroma product, it works in the same way as any other. Open up Razer Synapse, set it up how you want it, and you’re off to the races. The Razer Streaming mobile app also now supports the Key Light Chroma, and the additional Streamer Companion app should support it. I’m having a couple of bugs with that right now, but the idea is that you can use this app to link your Key Light Chroma to your stream alerts for added interactivity.

If you’re looking for brightness, then you’re in good hands with the Razer Key Light Chroma. The panel itself is pretty massive and can be very bright. If you’re streaming on Twitch, the chances of needing it maxed out are almost nil unless you exist close to a black hole. That power opens up the possibility of using the Key Light Chroma to illuminate a larger studio environment. With just a small number of these, you could easily replace a raft of oversized softboxes.

When using colored light, the Key Light Chroma imposes a brightness limit of 15%. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s absolutely fine and it has been designed to ensure good quality illumination over searing brightness.

The brightness is a good thing, but it’s worth considering your setup before pulling the trigger. Even on a fairly low setting, the Key Light Chroma is bright, and you might find it quite overpowering if you’re in a small space. Colored light less so than white, but it’s still pretty strong.

The Key Light Chroma is also a significant investment. It retails for $300, so it comes at a price. I’ve previously covered the Elgato range of Key Lights and said exactly the same thing. Whether the price is worth paying is up to you, and there’s no doubting the convenience and the overall value, but they are still out of the reach for those on a tight budget.

The main alternatives to the Key Light Chroma come from Elgato, which has a full Key Light line, from the very small (Key Light Mini) to the full-sized version, which is a match for the Chroma.

Aside from the lack of RGB on the Elgato products, they’re similarly bright, well made, pricey, and easy to use with wireless connectivity. At some point, you would expect a version supporting Corsair’s iCue lighting platform, but for now, you get plain white light, admittedly with a wide temperature range.

Another alternative is the excellent Lume Cube Panel GO, which is extremely bright at 1,000 lumens. It’s small, wireless with a built-in battery, and has an adjustable color temperature. For smaller spaces and on-the-go creators, it’s a definite win over something the size of the Razer Key Light Chroma.

Razer Key Light Chroma: Should you buy it?

You should buy this if …

• You’re a content creator in need of lighting.
• You want interactive stream lighting.
• You want more than just white light.

You shouldn’t buy this if…

• You’re on a budget.
• You’re in a small space.

You don’t have to be a gamer to get use from the Razer Key Light Chroma. The simple fact is that having the freedom to use any color lighting you can imagine makes it a class leader. Content creators looking to get their lighting sorted would do well to grab one or more of these since it’s one of the best streaming accessories available.

4
out of 5

As with similar competing products, though, the Razer Key Light Chroma is a serious investment for budget streamers. And for small spaces, it’s potentially still a bit too much. However, the quality of the product is outstanding. For an easy way to make your stream lighting more interesting, you can’t get much more straightforward than this. Extra bonus points if you have other Chroma-compatible lighting products.

RGB makes everything better. In this case, it’s not remotely a meme, it really does.