This part of the setup is easy peasy. To connect the controller to your PC via USB, you're going to need a USB Type-C to USB-A cable for your PC (or a USB Type-C to Type-C cable if you happen to have a convenient port available). While the PlayStation 5 console comes with one packed in, the DualSense sold by itself doesn't. Bummer! Get your hands on a cable, plug it in, and you're on your way.

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For the money, you get some decent control, with color temperatures from 2,700 K to 6,500 K and a brightness of 250 lumens. You can control the whole thing analog-style with the rocker buttons on the back, but the Logitech G Hub software for Windows or Mac will also control it from your desktop if the Litra Glow is plugged directly into the computer, not a power block. With the software, you can make presets to instantly jump between the best light settings.

If you just want your DualSense to work like any ol' gamepad, though, you can leave this screen alone, no tweaking required.

To use the DualSense via Bluetooth, you'll need a USB Bluetooth adapter (or a motherboard with Bluetooth built-in). To get connected, open the "Bluetooth & other devices" menu in Windows by pressing the Windows key and typing "Bluetooth." Then click "Add Bluetooth or other device" and the first item on the next menu that says "Bluetooth." Your PC will start searching for available devices.

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You've probably seen it as you scroll through Tiktok or admire someone's incredible Instagram selfie: a tell-tale ring of light in the subject's pupils. That halo in the eye is a reflection from a ring light. It's the illumination option of choice, as it lets you centrally locate a recording device, usually a smartphone, right in the middle of a light that diffuses over your face or whatever you're photographing or recording. It zaps away the shadows with uniform light.

If you prefer to configure the DualSense for non-Steam games without adding those games to your Steam library, wonderful community tool DS4Windows added DualSense support. (Shouldn't it be DS5Windows? Hm, that doesn't sound quite as good).

Before releasing the PlayStation 5, Sony hyped up its new controller's unique triggers and advanced haptics as killer new features. And they weren't wrong—though not many games use the DualSense to its fullest, it's a great controller. It's also dead simple to use on PC, and not just in Sony's PlayStation ports.

This utilitarian unit hits the sweet spot of price and usability for on-the-go video makers, but the sheer size makes it a lot harder to take with you. A carry bag will set you back another $57.

Thanks to those special features we think the PS5 controller is one of the best PC controllers, though not just because of them. It has to feel good in the hand, too, and it definitely does. It's also very easy to use on PC, either wired (all you need is a USB-C cable) or wireless via Bluetooth.

The Lume Cube kit does come with a sticky suction cup option for placing on your desk, or better yet, the back of your monitor, to accompany your webcam as a fill light. This is helpful because the tripod extender only goes to 30 inches, which in my tests wasn't quite tall enough to peer over my main PC displays. It helps that you can orient the panel in portrait, not just landscape. The light comes with a white silicon softening diffuser around it, so the concentrated 112 LEDs—already behind a frosted lens—won't appear as harsh when reflected in your eyeballs.

The Neewer 18-Inch arrived with a rattle inside that made me think it was shattered in transit. Thankfully, it was only the beads from a broken desiccant pack. There's not much else breakable, as the $109.99 ring is made of 204 LEDs mounted behind a white plastic soft filter. This unit seems incredibly large when set up, thanks to a substantial stainless steel tripod that keeps it upright. The tripod itself doesn't bend like the base on one of the many other, more expensive Neewer 18-inchers, but the mount does angle.

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You don't get a range of color temps, only three pre-sets of 3,000 K (warm white), 4,500 K (balanced), and 6,500 K (cool white). Brightness is pre-set to 50% to start, but you can go down to 10% or up to 100% (500 lumens). The light has a threaded tripod hole, so you can mount the light ring on other tripods or holders; the included tripod goes up to 53.2-inches high.

I've been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally for over 30 years, more than half of that time with PCMag. I run several special projects including the Readers' Choice and Business Choice surveys, and yearly coverage of the Best ISPs and Best Gaming ISPs, plus Best Products of the Year and Best Brands. I work from my home, and did it long before pandemics made it cool.

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This is one of the few video lights with a battery in it, so you can really take it on the road. It's supposedly ready to run for up to 16 hours. Adjustments to the brightness and the color temp (3,200 to 5,600 K) are all done with a button and dial on the side. You can read the settings, including battery life, on a small LCD on the back. You plug it in via an included USB-C-to-USB-A cable; there's also a 6-inch USB-C-to-USB-A female adapter if you want to power this from a USB-C port on your PC. If you don't care about going on the road, just leave it plugged in all the time.

To start, connect the DualSense to your PC via wire or Bluetooth as described above. Once you have it connected, open Steam and click Settings > Controller. From this part of the settings menu, you can now click "Desktop Configuration" to check out and customize the button layout.

The DualSense will now be accessible in Windows with its DirectInput driver, which some games will recognize and let you rebind controls out of the box. But many PC games today are built around Microsoft's newer XInput driver for the Xbox controllers, so the DualSense will be a bit limited without some help.

The plusses are the very sturdy tripod/extender that goes to 61-inches high, a carry bag (which doesn't fit the tripod), and that it has the little red Bluetooth shutter control that Neewer likes to toss in. Otherwise, this $110 ($94 on Amazon) kit is better avoided for even one of the less expensive models.

For a little more money than Razer's offering, the $99 Lume Cube 12-inch Ring Light comes out swinging. Not only does this one has a battery option to go cordless, but it also comes with a carry case to make that portability a reality—the bag even holds the 6.5-foot tripod/stand. There's an AC power adapter in addition to the battery and its charger. The ball-joint camera mount holds the rotatable holder for your smartphone that goes in the middle of the ring.

Support for the DualSense gamepad's fancy haptic feedback and adaptive triggers is fairly common in today's triple-A PC games: Silent Hill 2, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, and Star Wars Outlaws are just a few examples of 2024 games that support the PlayStation 5 controller's punchy triggers. (You can see a full list of games that work with the DualSense here.)

I found the flex mount for the phone a little hard to work with. But once things are in place, this is an effective light to get your influencer career started. It can work behind the monitor as a decent fill light for meetings if you have the desk space. It's not perfect for either job, though the price is.

Logitech's $60 light is no ring, and not really much of a panel because it's a square. Litra Glow is a fill light that gives you visage a little more oomph when on a video call. It seems pricey for what comes out of the box—a small 3.5-by-3.5-inch light that mounts on top of a monitor to face you, plus a 5-foot power cable (USB-C-to-USB-A). The 7-inch-long clip seems ridiculous at first, but it offsets the weight of the light to extend it upward. Optionally, take it off the clip and thread it onto a tripod.

This light is light—as in flimsy-feeling—and coupled with the equally insubstantial tripod stand, it's for newbies, and not top of the line.

You can choose Calibrate to tweak the joystick sensitivity, and Preferences to give the controller a name, enable/disable rumble, and configure the color and brightness of the LED strip around the touchpad.

Steam added basic support for the DualSense back in November 2020, and has continually improved the DualSense functionality since then. It's great now! Using Steam is by far the easiest way to get your DualSense working on PC, even if you want to play non-Steam games. I'll explain that in a moment.

If you search online for ring lights, you'll find hundreds of models, many from Chinese companies you've never heard of before such as Ubeesize, Aptoyu, and Mactrem. We narrowed the selection down to names like Neewer, Yesker, and Lume Cube that had some good reviews, and we even found devices from Razer, the company behind some of PCMag's favorite laptops.

Light rings come in several sizes, from 10 to 22 inches in diameter. Most have hundreds of small surface-mounted LEDs that can be manipulated for brightness, as well as something arguably more important: color temperature. That's what gives light the appearance of a warm orange at the low end (1,000 Kelvin) all the way up to a blinding, bright blue at 10,000 K. Most ring lights keep the range between a warm white at 3,200 K and a cool white at 6,500 K. They're (usually) easily adjusted, either digitally or with a dial, to find the most flattering color temperature.

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The 3-by-5-inch mini panel that is the Lume Cube Broadcast Lighting Kit is recommended to be used in pairs to avoid shadows. If the price of $99.99 was a little lower—a dual kit is sold for $189.99—that might seem more reasonable, but this is definitely a great runner-up to the Razer Key Light Chroma.

Razer fans and people with plenty of cash, this is what you want. If you find it hard to justify the spend for a couple of these, there are 2-packs of full video light kits from Neewer at almost half the price, complete with phone controls. But they lack the temperature range, the Chroma effects, the desk mounts, and the overall coolness factor.

Razer's 12-inch offering is a standard, low-end unit with few bells and whistles. It sells for $80 direct ($20 less on Amazon). It comes in the usual great Razer packaging, however, so you feel like you're getting a treat even if the contents are pretty standard. Inside is the light, a tripod that can adjust for desk or floor use, a flex bracket to hold a phone, and a ball-joint bracket for other cameras (such as the Razer Kiyo webcam) that have a threaded tripod mount. The button controls for the light are all found on the power cable, which plugs into a USB-A port on a PC, outlet, or power block (but a 5V 2A power block is not included).

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).

I don’t' know why a 14-inch light would get a model number of RL-12, but it's right there on the box. Other mysteries of the RL-12 Ring Light are why it has a very rigid extender that the paperwork describes as "flexible" (it's not—bending it was like trying to twist a lead pipe), and why, when you see the color temperature options, would anyone buy this?

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If you want to use the DualSense in a game that you own on the Epic Games Store for example, there's a solution that should work for just about anything, even emulators. The easy way to do it: Bring Steam back into the picture.

Light rings typically come with a tripod of some sort. Usually, it can adjust in height to be used on a desktop or standing fully upright to capture a subject far away. A mount in the center of the ring holds a phone, typically those measuring 3.6 inches wide or smaller. Many brands seem to use the same phone bracket, and it's not going to work with a tablet or even a very fat smartphone. Most light rings offer an option for a threaded tripod mount that works with high-end digital cameras and even some webcams. Some come with special carry bags, extra-flexible arms, or Bluetooth camera-shutter activators.

There's an on/off switch on the back; once the light is on, you control it with a single dial to change the brightness. Depress the dial once to adjust the color temp (3,200 to 5,600 K); depress it again to see the amount of battery left. It's all displayed on a little LED indicator screen on the rear.

Unlike most of the rest, you don't get any digital read-out whatsoever to set the brightness (controlled by the on/off dial) or the color temp (a separate dial to go between 3,200K and 5,600K). If you have a color temp you like, you can set it and never touch it, but you can't with the brightness. There is a nice option, however: a USB-A charger port on the back to plug in your dying phone/camera battery as you record.

As you can see in the image above, click the 'Games' menu in Steam, then choose the "Add a Non-Steam game to my library..." option to pull up a list of programs on your PC. In most cases, this should allow you to add a game and use a controller with Steam acting as the intermediary.

Whether you're a social media influencer or just want to upgrade your look in web meetings, a good ring light or LED panel is a must-have companion for your camera.

There are two dials on the front, one for cool light, and the other for warm, rated for a color temp range of 3,200 to 5,600 K, but you can't tell what the setting is because this unit is all analog. The hot shoe mount in the center of the light is easy to work with, but was tight even on my iPhone XS, so larger phones will be a problem. There's a bright red, Bluetooth-based smartphone camera shutter remote in the box you can use to start or stop a video, or shoot a still with your phone mounted.

The Razer Key Light Chroma isn't a ring, but a light panel that measures 10 by 14-inches and comes with a hefty black aluminum desk mount. It's not cheap; $300 is going to be beyond what newbies can or should spend, but this isn't geared toward budding influencers. This is more for established streaming gamers looking to up their (video) game, so to speak.

Yesker's 14-inch ring light is a popular one due to the size and price ($89.99 direct, or $77.39 on Amazon). It comes with a travel bag, albeit one that doesn't hold the included tripod/stand. That stand has a telescopic rod and is identical in every way to the flimsy one that came with Lume Cube's 12-inch Ring Light, so you can kind of tell that all these companies have the same sources for parts and accessories. Yesker's 240 surface-mounted LEDs run off AC power, there's a flexible/rotatable holder for your phone, a hot shoe ball-joint unit for other cameras with a threaded tripod hole, and a small keychain Bluetooth shutter button controller with separate buttons for iOS and Android devices.

From the Desktop Configuration screen you can swap button bindings, change how the touchpad works (it can do separate left- and right-clicks) and also configure the gyroscope, if you want to use gyro aiming. You can also configure Action Sets and Action Layers to enable totally different button bindings and then switch to them on the fly in-game. For example, if you only wanted to use gyro controls while in a plane in GTA, you could create an Action Set for that and trigger it by pressing a specific key anytime you hop in a plane.

Thanks to Steam's fantastic built-in controller support, turning the DualSense pad into your everyday PC controller is really simple. Plug, play, press buttons. No complex setup here: it just works, and games will recognize the controller. It's pretty much as easy as using an Xbox controller.

We purchased five models to try in 12-, 14-, and 18-inch versions, all priced between $60 to $120. None of the light rings, not even the Razer, bowled us over, which is the trade-off for keeping the price down. But some were quite effective, and many could have the right combination of features and performance for your budget.

One important tip here: make sure PlayStation Configuration Support is checked under "General Controller Settings" if you want to customize your DualSense controller's layout or gyro controls. With this button checked, you can press the PlayStation logo button on the controller in any Steam game to pull up Steam's controller configuration screen.

Steam has an 'Add to library' feature for Windows executables that allows you to add other programs to your Steam library, and then make use of the Steam overlay.

The light itself is nice enough with 180 LEDs, but bright as it can get, you get almost zero control of color temperature—all you get is a set of white plastic diffusers (the equivalent of 5,500 K) or orange plastic diffusers. That's it.

A ring light or LED panel may be just the beginning of your spiffed-up online persona. You may also want to learn How to Get Started in Game Streaming, and it's a perfect time to learn TikTok Tips for Beginners and Aspiring Influencers. Or maybe you just want to look nicer in a video conference. For even more ways to improve your look and even your sound, be sure to check out The Best Webcams and The Best USB Microphones.

To use DS4Windows, connect your controller to PC via USB or Bluetooth as explained above with DS4Windows open, and you should then be able to customize your keybinds, change the LED and monitor the controller's battery level. DS4Windows will let you use the DualSense in any PC game with Xbox controller support.

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Another category of illumination might better suit some people, especially work-from-home types: LED panels (aka light panels). These are fill lights for a camera, trained on you for meetings or while streaming, and engineered for use on or around the desk where you work or perform. They come in many shapes and sizes, and some have hefty price tags. But depending on your video presence, a light panel may be the better fit.

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The light from this super-slim unit is stellar. It has a wide color range of 2,900 to 7,000 K, a blinding brightness up to 2,800 lumens, and is controllable from your PC or your smartphone using Razer's apps. Like almost everything from Razer, it supports a 16.8-million-color effect that you can use to dazzle—the light can even be set to react to events that happen live in your stream. Depending on the angle(s) of your camera(s), a panel like the Key Light Chroma might best be used in pairs, which means you're doubling an already substantial financial outlay. The apps can sync up to 11 lights. The panel can be mounted in portrait or landscape mode.

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In Windows the DualSense uses the generic DirectInput driver, which some games support out of the box. But most games today use Microsoft's newer XInput driver, which is where Steam Input really comes in handy. PCGamingWiki keeps a list of games that use the DualSense features, but below are some highlights that support both Adaptive Triggers and haptic feedback. It's far from an exhaustive list.

There is a catch: For many, Steam Input has to be disabled for the features to fully work properly. Steam Input supports advanced haptic feedback, but only if the game is designed to take advantage of the controller's features through Steam Input. So if you're playing any of the below and not feeling the triggers or delicate rumble do their thing, try disabling Steam Input.

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

The Litra Glow is a flexible, economical, easily adjustable fill light that can only help you look better on your webcam during video meetings. Serious gaming streamers will want one of the previously mentioned panels for maximum wattage, but this is the only light around that works this well right next to a webcam.

If you want to play non-Steam games with the DualSense there are a couple more steps involved, but nothing difficult. Here's a step-by-step guide to using the PS5 DualSense controller on PC with either wired USB or a wireless Bluetooth connection.

You should see the DualSense is now recognized and listed as a PlayStation 5 controller. Steam will automatically configure the keybinds to mimic an Xbox controller layout; the Triangle button is Y, the Square button is X, etc.

Mobility is great, but this unit has the flimsiest of all the tripod/stands of the units I tested—it simply would not stay level. It made the whole thing seem ready to tip over at any moment, which is not what you want when you're breaking down the latest TikTok dance trend.

On the DualSense, hold down the PlayStation logo button and the Share button (the small one to the left of the touchpad) until the LEDs around the touchpad begin flashing rapidly. Within a few seconds, a generic entry named "Wireless controller" should pop up in your Bluetooth devices list in Windows to connect to. Just click that to finish pairing.