It had been almost seven years since I reviewed the original Elgato Stream Deck, and it was revolutionary at the time, but I was shocked how much the overall experience had improved when I went hands-on with the Elgato Stream Deck Plus.
This is a ground-breaking new version of the Stream Deck and in addition to its all too familiar squishy buttons includes four dials as well as a touch screen strip that are both super helpful and add an extra bit of range to the capability of the Stream Deck.
Whilst the dials don’t seem like they’d add much, they allow you to control things such as brightness of your smart lights, the gain of your webcam, the volume of your audio or gain of your microphone. These were all things that were possible on the original, but required several button presses that wasn’t anywhere near as natural as turning a dial and nowhere near as accurate either if you want minor increments.
You can also push on the dials to cycle through a number of sec actions, for instance, I have all my office smart lights programmed to that one dial and can cycle through them with a push of each knob. If I were to have one criticism, there were a few actions that I was surprised couldn’t be described to dials, but no doubt more are getting added with each week.
There’s also a new touch strip that can be used in a multitude of ways. You can scroll through pages of actions on your Stream Deck Plus, view information that is related to the dial action and even press on each little section of the touch screen to control an action such as muting your microphone or turning off smart lights.
You’re absolutely going to get the most out of your Stream Deck if you’re using other Elgato products such as an Elgato Wave microphone, Facecam webcam and Elgato smart lights. I was super impressed with how well these devices are replicated on your switch board with your gain able to be displayed in real time as well the webcam of your iso.
There’s a number of plugins that can be downloaded from the Elgato marketplace for everything from Microsoft Teams, Photoshop, YouTube, Apple Music and Philips Hue, with even some of my more niche smart home products being on the list to my surprise.
The Stream Deck app has come a long way with every plugin that you add immediately showing what actions can be assigned to buttons and dials, with a drag and drop method to put your actions on your stream deck.
Creating shortcuts with keystroke is super easy as well and I was even impressed with how you can create profiles and assign them to a specific application, so when I open my messaging apps, I can get an emoji keyboard straight on my Stream Deck Plus as an example.
Similarly, setting up folders is super easy to house commands that you might need at a certain time, and creating multi actions is great for streamers who might have a set of actions that need to play out in succession with the touch of a button.
Really, you’ll need to weigh up whether you will make use of the dials and touch screen and whether that is more important than having a lot more buttons on some of the other Stream Decks available, but with how easy it os to swipe between pages using the new touch pad, I don’t think this will be an issue for most, especially with the advantages of having dials to make changes.