Continuing off of the last post, you should at least read this post to understand what you shouldn’t buy and why. Even if you’re impatient and just want to buy something, at least read this article.
Because the mechanical keyboard market is becoming more mainstream every day, the product quality spectrum ranges from great to meh. You want to avoid the meh products, and this article covers the biggest offenders.
There is no such thing as a ‘gaming’ keyboard
‘Gaming’ branded keyboards are the most important one to cover. To list some easy ones, avoid Razer, Corsair, Logitech, Steelseries, and really any other brand that you can think of that focuses on gaming. Gaming keyboards are part of a disappointing marketing ploy that plagues any peripheral market that can draw even the slightest ties to gaming. Gaming headsets, monitors, mice, chairs, desks (yes this exists), and of course, keyboards. The only excusable ones from this list are mice and maybe monitors, the rest are excuses for companies to increase margins by slapping a picture of some esports player on the cover and telling you that you can magically play 50% better. So what makes ‘gaming’ keyboards bad?
Gaming keyboards are like a car dealership telling you to drive their expensive Lamborghinis because the aerodynamics of those high-end supercars will increase your driving performance by up to 50%. This statement is total BS and the same applies to gaming keyboards: they won’t make you a better gamer. All gaming keyboards try to sell you on these features: faster actuation, n-key rollover (NKRO), and 1000 Hz polling rate.
Faster actuation
Faster actuation means that the keys are more sensitive; they’ll activate at shorter key presses. A very classic marketing scheme is to say that the keyboard switch activates at 1 mm instead of 2, therefore you’re 50% ‘faster’. In theory, sure, this isn’t a lie. But reducing the activation distance by 1 mm is so trivial that it won’t make any difference. Your reaction speed or ping will be on the magnitude of tens of times longer than it takes to press down a key. You won’t get any performance benefit from shortening your total input-to-action time from 40 ms to 39.4 ms. In fact, a shorter actuation distance can actually ruin your typing experience because the sensitive keys now register even if you just gently touch them, which is a massive problem. If reducing actuation distance made a difference, the esports meta would be using touchscreen keyboards which have no travel distance. But they don’t and no one else does because touchscreen keyboards are uncomfortable to use.
NKRO
NKRO means that you can press every single key on the keyboard and all of them will register. Try doing this on your keyboard right now, hold down a random combination of letters in a text editor and see how many register. You’ll notice that after 2 to 6 keys, newer inputs will not go through. This is a limitation with membrane keyboard designs, and keyboards that can read two inputs simultaneously are known to have 2-key rollover (2KRO). Replace the 2 with any other number, some common ones marketed are 6KRO and 10KRO. Now, gaming keyboards will market that they either have 6, 10, or n-key rollover. Without any thoughts, the ability to press more inputs and have them all register seems like a useful thing. But ask yourself this: how many times do you ever hold down more than 2 keys simultaneously, let alone mashing all the keys? I can understand 2KRO seeming like a low limit, you can’t hold 3 keys at once so say goodbye to complex macros. But will you ever need NRKO when 6KRO will be fine for all situations? NKRO might seem like a nice feature, but it has no practical value unless your metric for keyboard purchasing is to see if it can handle all inputs when you sit on it.
1000 Hz polling rate
The polling rate refers to how often your computer scans the keyboard for new inputs, on USB keyboards this maxes out at 1000 times per second. Some other values you’ll find are 125, 250, and 500. If you’re playing a competitive game at 125 Hz, that’s a theoretical input delay of 8 ms. At 1000 Hz, that delay is reduced to 1 ms which sounds like a great improvement… until you realize that even the 10 year old membrane keyboard at public buildings also probably scan at 1000 Hz. And even if it’s scanning at 500 or 250 Hz, that’s a delay increase of 3 ms at most. Your reaction speed is nearly 100 times longer than that, see why this marketing feature is also useless?
Other problems with gaming keyboards
To not make the criticisms against poor Razer and Co. too long, I’ll summarize other downsides to gaming keyboards here. This list is not comprehensive but covers the more significant problems.
- Overpriced for features and build quality
- Designed for teenage l33t gaYm3rz
- Low quality and non-standard keycaps
- Software bloat attached
Mecha-membrane and ‘hybrid’ switches
Now that the rant about gaming keyboards is over, it’s time to talk about this equally important (or even bigger) problem. If you bought a keyboard that had something along the lines of ‘mecha-membrane’ or ‘rubber dome hybrid’ you essentially got scammed, because these aren’t even mechanical keyboards at all. These keyboards are basically your typical membrane keyboard with clickers attached to make them sound noisy, since people who don’t know about mechanical keyboards just think they’re clicky and loud. The best example of this keyboard type is the Razer Ornata. Because these keyboards are membrane keyboards, they’ll deteriorate just like a $10 Dell keyboard at similar speeds. You’ll run into these keyboards when you cheap out too much and suddenly you see ‘mechanical keyboards’ being sold for $20 USD. The Ornata is a special case though because the manufacturer is Razer, so they charge more than $100 and none of that price hike goes into anything useful. The summary here is to not be too cheap and be aware of anything that tells you that the keyboard uses ‘mecha-membrane’ or hybrid switches’.
Obsessing with Cherry MX
Out of the many switch manufacturers, you’ll hear Cherry the most frequently with marketing lines of ‘German craftsmanship/engineering’. Cherry’s most popular switch model is the ‘MX’ design and it became the de facto standard around the early 2000s. Every premium keyboard brand uses MX switches these days. To make it brief, don’t believe that Cherry is the only manufacturer you should trust and buy from. There are clone manufacturers that do a better job for cheaper, notable ones are Gateron and Kailh. I’ve been out of the hobby scene for years now so my knowledge may be slightly outdated, but the fact that Cherry is a mediocre manufacturer hasn’t changed yet. MX switches are more expensive, more scratchy (unpleasant keyfeel), and Cherry hasn’t been making any innovations for a very long time. MX switches also have some notable problems; the clicky ones sound pretty meh (this is how a clicky switch should sound like), the tactile switches don’t feel that nice, and linears are relatively scratchy. If you didn’t understand any of this, don’t worry. Come back after reading about switch designs, which I’ll post later. The point is that some clone manufacturers make better switches using the same MX design, don’t scoff at them for not being ‘authentic’.
Dirt cheap keyboards
Cheap budget keyboards are a great way to get into mechanical keyboards and try them out, but in my opinion the best way to get a board is to do your research properly, try out some keyboards at stores to get an idea for how different switch types feel, then purchase one that you like (likely has to be done online). The problem with cheaper keyboards is that switch and build quality falls with the price. The build is flimsier or substitutes with cheaper materials, the switch manufacturer might not make good switches, or you get a mix of other negatives such as cheap keycaps, non-detachable cables, poor QC, or LEDs that die quickly. Cheaper keyboards also tend to look a bit ugly from my experience. It’s worth putting more effort into finding a good but obscure manufacturer than just grabbing whatever looks ok enough on Amazon.
Now you know what to avoid
While this article doesn’t cover everything that you should avoid, it will be sufficient for any newcomer. If you already knew more about mechanical keyboards, you would have known these arguments anyways. Hopefully you got the basic points: don’t buy gaming brands, never fall for mecha-membrane nonsense, don’t view Cherry MX as the only switch option, and put some time and effort into researching even if the price is higher. You want to buy one keyboard and not have buyer’s remorse, not try a bunch and burn yourself out. The next article will cover switch designs, which is really where most of what keyboard you should buy is decided.