The IT Nerd

I’m currently in the midst of redoing my desk setup which is being driven by my decision to run my 16″ MacBook Pro in clamshell mode full time. By doing so, it also means that I cannot use the webcam that’s built into the MacBook Pro. That’s a problem for me as I spend a fair amount of time on video calls via Microsoft Teams among other video conference apps. So as a result, I am now using this webcam and to enhance the light that it has to work with, I needed some sort of key light. Which is why I decided to go with this:

This is the Logitech For Creators Litra Glow key light. It has a bunch of features including:

• It mounts easily onto any monitor or laptop and adjusts for either use case.
• It has five levels of brightness as well as five colour temperatures to choose from. 
• A colour temperature range from 2,700 to 6,500 Kelvin and have a maximum output of 250 lumens.
• It is compatible with the Logitech G HUB that allows you to tweak all the settings digitally as opposed to using the controls on the back of the light.
• It’s powered via a USB-C to USB-A cable.

Here’s a look at the light and the range of adjustability that you get. It’s pretty extensive and you can pretty much set it up to fit whatever your use case happens to be.

Here’s a look at how it looks on my monitor:

As you can see, it hooks onto the front of the monitor, then you adjust the arm on the back until you find a length that is secure. You can also see the USB-C to USB-A cable running down the back. Since I have a standing desk, I tried moving the desk up and down to see if it would fall off and it didn’t.

But the real question is this light works. The short answer is yes. The long answer goes something like this. This does output a lot of light. At full strength, it is powerful enough to light up most of my home office at night if I have the lights off. I spent some time tweaking it and that time resulted in my face being clear when on camera.There are controls on the back that allow you to make it as bright or as dull as you want along with changing the colour temperature. That way you can get the look that you want. Thus I feel more than confident in saying that you will look great on your next Microsoft Teams call after you spend some time tweaking things to suit your environment.

I tried the Logitech G HUB software on my Mac as part of this review. First of all, it allows you to tweak the settings of the software via sliders while watching yourself on screen. Which is handy to make sure that everything is dialled in before you jump on a video call. Though that’s something that you are likely to do once or occasionally at best. The other thing that I noted is that it does have the ability to turn on and off the light when the camera is activated or deactivated. Though I did note that it would not work initially until I chose the MacBook Pro’s built in camera, which then generated a prompt that Logitech G HUB wanted to access the camera. When I gave it permission to do so, I had to switch it back to the external camera and then it worked flawlessly. Speaking of permissions, this software asked me for permission to record the screen and audio. I didn’t give it permission and it continued to work fine. Which begs the question, why was it asking me for permission to do that? Permission to access the camera I can understand because that’s clearly how it knows to turn the light on and off. But to record the screen and audio? That seems suspect to me.

What makes this light something that I would recommend to you is the price tag. I got it from Amazon for $53.99 CAD which is kind of hard to beat. Thus if you need to improve your video call game, this is a great product to do so.