Elgato reveals its 4K60 S, an external 4K HDR capture card that doesn’t need a PC – CES 2020

To simplify high-end game capture, Elgato has created its 4K60 S, an external capture card which can capture and pass-through footage without the need for a dedicated capture PC. Just insert a fast enough SD card, and users of the 4K60 S will be able to capture both HDR and SDR footage with bitrates of up to 140Mb/s and record audio over HDMI or 3.5mm audio jack.

If users wish, they can also connect their 4K60 S to a PC to enable the same options as Elgato’s other external capture devices, supporting software suites like OBS Studio, XSplit and Streamlabs OBS. The Elgato 4K60 S can connect to PCs using USB 3.0. 

For encoding, Elgato’s 4K60 S uses integrated HVEC /H.265 chips for HDR capture and an AVC /H.264 chips for SDR footage. This is how the Elgato 4K60 S is able to capture footage without a connected PC. To record 4K footage, this product requires an SD card that’s capable of 30MB/s transfer rates and meed the UHS Class 3 / V30 standard. A settings.txt file is created on connected SD cards to allow users to customise the recording settings on Elgato’s 4K60 S. 

The only downside of this capture device is that it only supports framerates of up to 60FPS, even at 1080p. Contrast this to Elgato’s 4K60 Pro series of internal capture cards, which can handle 1080p footage at framerates of up to 240Hz. The 4K60 S can only handle capture and pass-through of footage at up to 60FPS.