Razer Ripsaw and Stargazer Review

Review of Razer's Ripsaw and Stargazer

Today I'm going to talk about Razor's Ripsaw video capturing external card and also their stargazer camera.

First I want to talk about the Ripsaw.

It's very simple, it's small. You have a video in, a video out. It goes from your device, Xbox, PlayStation or your video card in the back of your PC, and then your monitor gets connected to the out so that you can see its pass through, it becomes a pass through so you can see what's going on. The problem I have with this ... You can also plug this in the USB into your machine. It installed great, worked fine, up and running in seconds, in minutes.

The problem I have with this is the resolution is limited to 1080p. What I was hoping for was, blow my mind, I thought maybe ... I have an Asus ultra wide monitor and output and stream it, but I find that with two PCs I can stream just as well.

Click here to see the Ultrawide on Amazon

The Ripsaw, maybe it's great if you're always playing 1080p and you have that type of aspect ratio of a 16:9, then this is going to be great for you. If you have an ultra wide monitor, it just gets really annoying and it's not really worth it.

The next thing I want to talk about is their Stargazer.

Click here to see the details of the Stargazer on Amazon

This is that fancy camera. Here's my issue with this camera: I plugged it in, I installed it and I got the blue screen of death, thread exception not found. I couldn't get around it. I couldn't go to an earlier restore point, which I tried. I just had all kinds of issues. I ended up having to reinstall Windows and spend a day doing that. After I reinstalled everything, I installed this again, I got the error right away. After doing some research, what I found was, in order to get this blue screen of death error, there's something with the latest version of Windows Update that interferes with USB 3.0 with specific devices. The Oculus Rift seems to have this issue and this camera has this issue. I don't know if it's the Intel Real Sense or what's common between the Oculus and the Stargazer.

What I had to do was in the BIOS setting, then I had go into BIOS, disable asmedia, which is a feature in your BIOS and used by USB three. I had to disable that then install, then I was able to boot up to Windows.

I was able to uninstall everything related to this camera, Intel, rollback the drivers, then I had to install a patch, then I could re-enable the BIOS and then I could do it again.

But, for all the trouble and all the junk that this needs to install, again, it's probably not the camera, it's probably the Intel Real Sense, after seeing it and I finally got it working, it just wasn't, it's not worth it. There's nothing this does that is impressive or worth using that you can't get away with with a Logitech, one of the high end Logitech web cameras.

The 3D piece of it, when are you ever going to use that. The greens moving the background if it was perfect, but it's not perfect. It's got all this sparkling artifacts. This just becomes, this is just a toy and it's not really worth keeping. Of all the crap that you have to install to make this work, it's not worth it.

I won't be using this, sending it back. I'm going to stick with the Logitech cameras for now.

Anyway, that's my thoughts on the Ripsaw and the Stargazer. Again, I'd recommend the Ripsaw if you want to use console gaming or if you always play in a 1080 resolution anyway with a 16 by 9 screen aspect ratio, then the Ripsaw might be worth using for all your capturing, but it's not for me.

Stargazer, I'd stay away from this unless there, for some reason, there's some feature it has that you must use, otherwise I don't really see that it's worth it.

The camera I'll be using is a Logitech 922X, and you'll find a link for that below if you're interested.

You can check this out on Amazon Here

-Mastro