Elgato Stream Deck Mini review: All your streaming actions and enhancements are a button push away

During Amazon’s Prime Day sale you’ll find all kinds of offers on Elgato streaming {hardware}, together with this Elgato Stream Deck Mini for simply $60—a $40 financial savings off checklist worth. 

Last yr I referred to as Elgato’s Stream Deck “a valuable tool in anyone’s streaming kit.” Long identified for reasonably priced seize tools, Elgato had entered one other essential {hardware} area of interest and created an affordable video switcher—one which was solely the dimensions of a card deck. With a number of customizable buttons, you can handle all sides of your streaming course of with out each leaving your major display.

But perhaps even a card deck is just too massive, and perhaps the Stream Deck’s 15 OLED buttons had been overkill, as a result of now Elgato’s returned with the Stream Deck Mini—a smaller, scaled-back, and even cheaper model (at $99.95 on Amazon) of the identical idea. So which is best for you? Let’s examine.

Juuust proper

The authentic Stream Deck is, as I stated, in regards to the dimension of a card deck—4.5 x 3.5 x 0.eight inches, to be precise. It’s fairly small, and simply tucked away behind a keyboard. And there’s a lot of utility in that compact house, with the aforementioned 15 OLED buttons organized in a 3×5 grid.

These buttons are totally programmable by the end-user, and additionally embody the power to create folders—increasing 15 buttons out to much more, should you (as an example) need to use Elgato’s software program to construct a group of Twitter-specific actions, one other for OBS, one other for Shadowplay, and so on, with maybe a handful of essential actions (“Start Streaming”) saved to the highest degree.

IDG / Hayden Dingman

It will be tough to fill all 15 of the Stream Deck’s buttons although, particularly should you’re a hobbyist or should you choose to deal with sure actions the old school method. I ended up filling our demo unit with some wholly pointless capabilities, like a few pertaining to Spotify. I didn’t want a lot past “Start/Stop Stream,” “Start/Stop Recording,” and perhaps some scene-switching behaviors.

The Stream Deck Mini appears tailored for folks like me. Instead of 15 buttons, it has six, three per row. They’re nonetheless OLED buttons, nonetheless totally programmable and with the power to customise the icon on every. In different phrases, it has the unique Stream Deck’s performance, simply…much less of it.

That’s greater than sufficient for me although. As I stated in regards to the authentic Stream Deck final yr, I’ve lengthy envied how straightforward consoles make the streaming course of—principally push a button and go. The PC nonetheless isn’t fairly really easy, and organising OBS or Shadowplay effectively takes some know-how, however we’re getting there. The Stream Deck Mini streamlines the method much more. Once you’ve received it arrange, it truly is about as straightforward as push-a-button-and-go.

IDG / Hayden Dingman

The setup

That stated, organising the Stream Deck Mini remains to be a bit arduous. The fundamentals are straightforward sufficient: Mapping a command to a button is a…