Independent Review of NewTek Connect Spark™
By Adam Noyes
Click here to watch the video on YouTube
“[NewTek Connect Spark] has already become an integral part of my workflow around here, especially now, as I can put cameras in places I couldn’t put them before.” – Lon Seidman
Lon Seidman, tech reviewer, and proprietor of YouTube channel Lon.TV, purchased a NewTek Connect Spark™ HDMI-to-NDI converter to add to his TriCaster® Mini based studio, and after taking time to work with it has now reviewed it for his channel. He gives a very thorough tour of setup and operation in the video.
Setup for use with an NDI-aware production system is plug-and-play, very literally. Seidman has already done the very minor assembly job of screwing on the two antennas before beginning the video, and in the video we see that he plugs in the power supply for the unit and the HDMI cable from the camera, goes to the TriCaster Mini UI and finds that the WiFi NDI signal has been detected and he assigns it to one of the virtual inputs just by selecting it from the source menu for that input. He mentions that the latency is very low, really not noticeable.
Seidman comments,
“I’ve been very impressed by how decent the WiFi connectivity was on this. I wasn’t expecting to use that at all but it has actually worked much better than I expected.”
While he does recommend using wired Ethernet wherever it is available for the consistent best result, he does conclude that with a dedicated WiFi connection users can expect very low latency and high-quality video. “If you have control of the WiFi, I think you are going to have a very good experience with this.”