Elgato’s Cam Link is a cheaper way to turn your HDMI camera into a webcam

Elgato has made a nice business for itself helping people capture game footage with its HD60 line of capture devices, which ingest video from HDMI input, while offering an HDMI passthrough so you can keep playing without latency. But the $179 price tag on the HD60 S is a little high, and not everyone needs the HDMI passthrough feature.

So now Elgato is introducing the $129.95 Cam Link, which is designed specifically for capturing footage from cameras with HDMI out — a feature most DSLRs, GoPros, and other medium-to-high-end cameras have. It plugs in over USB, and presents the camera to your computer as a standard webcam.

Like the HD60, the Cam Link can capture footage at 1080p, 60 fps from any unencrypted HDMI connection. It requires USB 3.x and an okay processor to handle the encoding, and the input is available to any software that supports webcams — like OBS, Skype, or Elgato’s own streaming software. The Cam Link works with both Macs and PCs.

If you already have an HD60 or other method of HDMI input, there’s no advantage to the Cam Link, but it could be a nice option for adding another HDMI input to an existing setup if your computer can handle the extra work. The Cam Link is available now on Amazon and Elgato’s own store, but Amazon currently lists it as out of stock.