With ebay and the other sites being very quiet at the moment I'm getting a bit bored with no real TEA action. I did toy with the idea of getting another Fluke 8840AF from Express Auctions in the USA but decided that I have 5 bench meters already including 2 Flukes (8840A and 8842A) and how many meters does one person actually need
so I decided to leave them for you all to get a go at em
Then last week I get a email from Wish with some offers on it and one of them was mechanical gaming keyboard backlit with Cherry Red switches, just like my Corsair K70 which I'm very impressed with apart from the fact the backlight is all red, the Wish one was RGB, all for just £20 delivered. So I ordered it, thinking that if it turned to be shit, I could use it as a back up keyboard, that was on the 5th Feb. Well today the darned thing was delivered, all the way from China in just 7 days
I unwrapped it and was surprised to see how much space on my bench this going to save me, manual was all in Chinese, why do that if your selling worldwide
.
Its quite well constructed too, the top is alloy so its stiff unlike some keyboards in its price range which Linus tested and they flex badley, this one is very stiff. I pulled a couple of key caps off and sure enough, the switches do appear to be Cherry Red just like the Corsair keyboard and the key caps are in the most part interchangeable with those on the Corsair. Plugging it in it all lit up and the RGB is not quite what I thought, each row has its own colour and is not changeable, RGB turns out to be just 6 colours, yellow, white, green, magenta, blue and red but it does have lots of cool lighting effects and 3 customisable modes that can be saved to the 1,2 and 3 keys. This allows you to select 3 games and then you select which keys are used in the game and save them, each game to its own key and this locks out all other keys and also turns off their backlighting as well.
It has 2 selectable settings for key rollover as well, hmm this is getting better by the minute. You can control the the speed and brightness of the various (9) lighting effects. Does not have the usual LEDs for the caps lock etc, instead it lights up the legend on the key cap if the locks are selected, cool touch. Another cool touch is that it has a braided USB lead and is nicely protected where it enters the keyboard with a strain relief. It has a nice typing feel to it and the only thing I think against is that like the Corsair, because the legends are designed to be illuminated, if you normally use a keyboard with the backlight off when not gaming, the legends are pretty hard to read.
I'll leave you to look at the video I found on line which shows this keyboard and its lighting effects and in case anyone wants to get one, this reviewer has kindly worked what the controls are for lighting and has included them below his video.
So to sum up this turned out to be a far better bargain than I thought it would be, the only improvement on it would be if each key was truly RGB but for £20 I'm well stoked. Mine has black keycaps.
EDIT:
The FN keys don't show when viewing the video over this link, so here is the list apart from the rollover function which I need to fathom out first.
==== KEYBOARD FUNCTIONS ====
Key combinations:
FN + F10 = Volume Down
FN + F11 = Volume Up
FN + F12 = Mute
FN + F5 = Opens File Explorer
FN + F6 = Opens default web-browser
FN + F7 = Opens default mail application
FN + F8 = Opens Calculator
FN + F9 = Cycle Lightning modes
FN + Page Up = Increase Brightness
FN + Page Down = Decrease Brightness
FN + "+" = Pattern speed increase
FN + "-" = Pattern speed decrease
FN + END = Lock/Unlock FN-button
FN + WIN = Lock/Unlock Windows Button
==== CUSTOM PROFILES ====
When on FN + 1 (CM1), FN + 2 (CM2) , FN + 3 (CM3) you can change the lightened keys.
Example:
Press FN + 1 (CM1) to chose CustoM 1
Press FN + ESC to start recording active keys (numlock, scroll-lock and numlock will blink during this)
Press W,A,S,D to light WASD up
End recording session with FN + ESC
Use FN + 1 (CM1) to use your new lightened WASD-keys only.