I'm in the market for a backlit keyboard.
Are there any cheap/mid-range ones that are actually decent? Everything I've looked at seems to be either dodgy looking unbranded Chinese Amazon/Ebay junk, overpriced "ULTIMATE XTREEME GAMER" stuff or high end £100+ mechanical keyboards. I just want something basic and reliable I can use at night with the lights off which won't fail after a couple of years. My only requirements are:
- Wired (usb)
- Adjustable brightness (preferably without needing configuration software on the PC)
- Backlight which isn't blue or white.
- Reasonable key travel distance (not flat/laptop style keys)
I'm not too bothered about premium mechanical switches and whatnot, I've never broken a keyboard by using it and I'm happily typing this on an ancient "free with every dell optiplex" PS/2 keyboard my Dad grabbed out of the office e-waste bin when I was a teenlad.
The Razer Cynosa is cheap and cheerful. It's not mechanical, but the keys are still plenty tactile. The only drawback of Razer's stuff is needing to have their software installed to control the LEDs, but I keep mine on red with the lowest brightness level and it does the trick just nicely.
It's time I finally learn the lesson and ditch Logitech. Their stuff simply never lasts.
The microswitches their meece use always, ALWAYS start developing the double-click issue, and it's a fucking faff to sort out. I thought their keyboards would be fine but no- It had one of the LEDs go almost immediately, so the RGB became RG or else I'd always have the Q key looking different and wrong and my OCD cannot tolerate it. Then it recently developed double keystrokes. It's really fucking annoying because you'll try to sprint in a game, for instance, but you stop as soon as you start because it registers as a double press. Or when you're trying to type out long .gs posts and you have to keep going back to delete duplicate letters.
It's just annoying because they genuinely have features no other company has- The Logitech mouse I've been using is the only one with an adequate number and correctly placed buttons for me to comfortably play PVP in Elder Scrolls Online. Like, those buttons genuinely give me an edge, and I feel bad for my opponents because I can activate my abilities so seamlessly and I know they're doing some claw bullshit pressing WASD and the number keys.
So. What brand is the absolute most reliable, lads? For a keyboard I think I'd prefer to just go with plain white backlighting because the RGB shit is just too much hassle, and it matches the LEDs on my speakers/monitor that way. For a mouse my primary concern is having at minimum 5 extra buttons, but ideally located in a sort of ambidextrous layout like pic related, not the ones where it's got 20 extra buttons but they're all crammed on one side near your thumb.
>So. What brand is the absolute most reliable, lads?
Any mechanical keyboard is going to be extremely reliable due to the design of the switches - even cheap generic mechanical switches have a realistic lifespan of 50 million keystrokes.
As regards mice, your best option is to install Kailh GM switches in your Logitech mouse of choice; if you can't solder, I'd probably go with a Zowie ZA version A.
>>28128 This is my main concern with "gaming" keyboards, it's hard to tell if they're actually worth the money or if you're just paying gamer tax on cheap junk even with supposedly legit brands.
Where I work we use copious amounts of cheap office keyboards and mice from Dell etc. which see more use and abuse than the average home setup and I've never seen one fail from mechanical wear. Yet when I look at reviews for gaming stuff even from supposedly reputable brands like Logitech people are always complaining about the switches being unreliable or breaking too easily.
Gaming mice have a very specific failure mode. When you click your mouse button, the electrical connection is rarely a clean on/off - the electrical contacts physically bounce around at the precise moment the contacts open or close, which causes a very brief on-off-on-off-on-off oscillation.
On a standard mouse, a simple circuit smooths out that oscillation ("debouncing"), but that causes a few milliseconds of delay between pressing the button and your computer registering the click. For a competitive gamer, that slight delay is genuinely noticeable and has a meaningful impact on performance, so gaming mice use just barely enough debouncing to minimise the delay. That's fine when the mouse is brand new, but over time the switch contacts start to corrode and deform, the bouncing gets worse and you start getting double clicks when you only clicked once. The problem is compounded by the fact that gamers wear out switches much faster, because many games require very rapid clicking.
Logitech are notorious for making excellent mice with shitty switches, but the double-click issue is far from unique to them.
>Where I work we use copious amounts of cheap office keyboards and mice from Dell etc. which see more use and abuse than the average home setup and I've never seen one fail from mechanical wear.
Gaming puts some really weird and extreme demands on your equipment. You know the little slippery plastic feet on the underside of your mouse? Mine are glass, because I wear through the standard teflon ones in about six months. The keycaps on my keyboard are made of a high-hardness plastic called PBT, because I will wear deep dents in standard ABS keycaps in a matter of months. Office keyboards might get bashed about, but they're barely used by our standards.
>>28128 I'm not sure hat happened to Logitech but they used to be great. I stopped using my MX518 when after a decade of use the rubber started turning into a sticky mess (currently I use an MM711 which works but I hate the feel), and for normal use I swear by my K310 which is several years old. Sure, it's a rubber dome keyboard, but the feel is honestly not that bad and being able to stick it under the tap to rinse it off is a killer feature. I have a Filco Majestouch which I adore, a couple of Cherry based keyboards (brown and blue), but I keep coming back to the K310. They used to cost under £30 and I have a couple of spares, I wouldn't spend the near £70 that's being asked for them now, but I have no expectation that this thing is going to die before me so fingers crossed...
Instead of a backlit keyboard, I'd get a keyboard that suits you and a decent USB LED light. Most of the RGB backlit blah blah is expensive garbage, get the keyboard you want and just ensure you have the sufficiently minmal lighting needed to use it.
I just relented and bought another one of these mice. It's only 25 quid but it's sill basically the best mouse I've ever used, I have tried but I just can't get comfortable with different ones. I might have to stockpile a few in case they ever get discontinued.
I also ditched my fancy schmancy mechanical keyboard a bit ago because it was registering double key presses all the fucking time, it got to be absolutely unbearable. Got a relatively cheap Razer Ornata V3X instead, which is just rubber dome, but nice low profile keys with a backlight and no other nonsense. Lesson learned about following the trends I suppose, but there again, you never know until you try something out do you.
I've always had better experiences just buying relatively cheap peripherals, because in the end expensive ones still break just as often. From now on I'm going to stick to that principle.
