Elgato “Prompter” Teleprompter Review

A Closer Look & Performance

The Prompter is a lovely looking bit of kit, and having played with a few rival products over the years, they often feel like flimsy and awkward pain-in-the-arse jank, but the Prompter just oozes premium quality the moment you take it out of the box. Prompters typically require an tablet, phone or similar device to be placed on a mount, then use a mirror system to reflect your phone.

However, Elgato have equipped their device with its own screen. When best, is rather than struggling with poorly made applications and exporting to your phone, this simple acts like an additional screen from your PC. Getting a video, chat feed, script or whatever onto this screen is no harder than dragging the appropriate content onto the screen as you would moving from one display to another on your desktop!

The Prompter supports a vast array of mounting hardware and cameras. It’s built to be relatively standardised camera and studio hardware, so you’ll find all the usual screw mounts and fittings, allowing you to easily integrate it into your camera hardware, tripods, booms and anything else really.

On the side of the display, there’s a Type-C input, which powers the device, but also acts as the display connection, making it a single cable solution, which is of course, absolutely fantastic for getting it setup and in use, there’s so little to do!

Want to use the fantastic Elgato Facecam Pro web cam? It comes with a custom mounting plate specifically for that device.

Want to use your big lenses? The round fitting will get the job done, and as we saw, there’s a whole lot of adaptor rings to ensure it gets that perfect fit.

Here it is mounted on our Blackmagic URSE MINI 12K, and as you can see, it fits perfectly, no issues so far, and installation was simple enough.

With the included fittings, it mounts to our Sigma 18-35mm lens with no issues, but again, there’s all the bits you would need to mount it to any other lens too.

The display is 9″, so a decent size and comparable to other solutions on the market. It’s go ta 1024 x 600 resolution, which doesn’t sound a lot, but it’s plenty when all you need to see is a chat window, or some large font text for you to read while filming.

Another nice feature is the included hood, which can help prevent any unwanted light sources getting through the mount, to your lens, etc, and just overall helps iron out any small issues that could conflict with your recording or the display.

The panel is nice and bright, and as I said, it simply acts like an additional display on your desktop. You could mirror your desktop, have it as an extra display. You could literally use it to watch the football while you’re on a work teams call, or to have a face-to-face call with friends and family, it’s pretty fantastic to be honest.

The resolution is decent, and as you can see, it has good colour and contrast too. We used to use an aftermarket teleprompter that we used with an old iPad. The iPad would constantly suffer from running slow, apps we used would depreciate, moving files to it was a pain, you’d have to take it out the mount to interact with it, charge it, etc. With this, we just drag and drop, and it’s good to.

It means we can use virtually anything we can think of too, such as the Elgato software, obviously, or notepad, a YouTube video, I could read a news article from social media, or whatever, it’s just infinitely more useful than anything else we’ve tried in the past.

Don’t worry, that’s meant to look reversed, as you can see above, it uses an angled mirror to reflect it back to you, making everything look in the correct orientation.

As you can see, with all that hardware on the front, out image quality is not impacted in any way, the camera just works as it always has. Plus, the prompted only weighs a bit over 600 grams, so it’s not putting much weight on the front, heck, I’ve got lens that weight significantly more than that, and they don’t bother the camera either.