Review: Elgato Prompter

The scripts I write for my YouTube videos are … a bit excessive. I write very carefully and want to read my words just how I wrote them. This means I like having a teleprompter to see my script without breaking my eyeline. After waffling between a few options over the years, I’m delighted by how much easier the Elgato Prompter is to use than the competition.

Elgato is best known for making streaming tools and accessories, and I haven't had many qualms with its hardware. I was optimistic about testing the Prompter. It’s designed to work seamlessly with the rest of the Elgato ecosystem—including the Elgato Facecam (not included)—but you can bring your own camera, and the company includes accessories to do just that.

The Prompter is more or less an external display that connects via USB-C to your PC. A two-way angled mirror sits on top with a platform on the back to hold your camera. The platform has plenty of adjustment points to line up whatever camera you have so you can get the perfect eyeline.

Photograph: Eric Ravenscraft

No Walled Garden

Often, when a company makes an ecosystem of products and designs them to work together, it comes at the expense of being interoperable with third-party devices. Not so with the Elgato Prompter.

By default, it’s designed to work with the Elgato Facecam using a custom-fitted backplate. Teleprompters work by reflecting light onto a two-way mirror while a camera sits behind it. The only problem with this setup is that if any light shines from behind the mirror, it passes through and you can’t see the reflection. Most teleprompters solve this by having a small curtain that covers the camera, blocking out any external light. If you’re using the Facecam, the included backplate is shaped perfectly to block out any background light without a cumbersome curtain.

Photograph: Eric Ravenscraft

On the other hand, if you’re working on a production that mandates a $280 teleprompter, there’s a decent chance you have something better than a $130 webcam. So, Elgato includes a pair of alternative backplates. One, a universal shroud, has a simple rectangular hole and fabric shroud, like the one I described above. If all else fails, this backplate handles any camera that can fit inside the teleprompter.

If Elgato only included these two, it would be sufficient, but the company went beyond and included a DSLR/mirrorless backplate and eight step-up rings from 48 mm to 77 mm. These rings attach directly to the front of your camera lens. The rings then slot directly into the Prompter’s backplate, blocking out all stray light without requiring a hood. It made it much easier to hook up my cameras to the prompter.

The Prompter also comes with a platform that can be adjusted up or down to line the camera up exactly where needed. The camera can also be bolted to the platform, though in my testing it wasn’t quite spacious enough to handle larger devices like Blackmagic’s cinema cameras. If you’re using a particularly bulky camera or long lens with the Prompter, you might need to build a custom rig to mount it.

As a nice little bonus, the Prompter has two hot-shoe mounts along its top, allowing you to mount things like lights or a microphone. This is handy if you have to build a rig around the prompter.

Photograph: Eric Ravenscraft

The Second Screen I Need

Teleprompters got relatively inexpensive once manufacturers realized many people have iPads (or a spare phone) sitting around they can use to display their scripts. We even recommend a couple of these. Elgato takes the Prompter in a different direction by including a screen directly.

When connected to a computer (either Windows or Mac), this screen is recognized as an external display, just like any other monitor. By default, it can mirror or extend your desktop, allowing you to use whatever app to show your script. You can even open up a Google Doc and bump the text size up if you want to put as little effort into messing with the teleprompter as possible.

Fortunately, you don’t have to. The Elgato Camera Hub software has a robust tool that makes it incredibly easy to turn any text document into a properly formatted scrolling script. Copy text into the app and it will create a set of slides, separated by paragraphs, that you can easily jump between. You can click on any slide to jump to that part of the script or press the Previous or Next buttons to hop to an adjacent paragraph.

Photograph: Eric Ravenscraft

These are excellent little features that help if you mess up a take or want to do another read of a certain part. You can also adjust font size and line spacing, and there’s an optional overlay that adds a small blue target to help you keep your eye on the camera lens while you’re reading, to help avoid the telltale eye drift that can give away that you’re reading from a prompter.

I’ve used a few different teleprompter apps and while this one isn’t the most fully-featured—it would be nice to import scripts from Google Docs or Word files, for example—it’s robust enough that I can swap to it full-time.

You can even use the Stream Deck mobile app to control the Prompter without needing a laptop close by, although the current version for Android is subscription-only, starting at $3 per month. If you’re on iOS, you can get six buttons to control the Prompter (or anything else Stream Deck works with) for free.

The Elgato Prompter isn’t the cheapest teleprompter out there, but it’s not substantially more expensive. It is, however, better than any other inexpensive prompter I’ve used. The built-in screen is crisp and flexible enough to use any software solution I need, there are plenty of mounting options for just about any camera I could put on it, and the little extras like a set of step-up rings and hot-shoe mounts make it simple to integrate into my setup. If you've been frustrated with a lot of teleprompters, this one is a worthy upgrade.