Gadgetory

can't seem to find sleeved cables in the exact pattern and color of your choice from now until November seventh cable mod is offering 20% off all products in their cable configurator click the link in the description below and use the code mod 20 for a generous discount on quality custom cables oh yeah what's up guys welcome back to the channel today we are doing another review on this beautiful keyboard right behind me this is the Tesoro gram spectrum RGB but meaning to do this review for a while just now getting around to it and you'll excuse the loose unscripted format for today's video I've actually kind of been in a rush this week because I leave for Hong Kong in just a couple days so I'm trying to pump out a lot of content before I hop up my flight so I actually have stuff to post while I'm abroad so yeah but this is a pretty cool keyboard we're talking about today it is a mechanical keyboard it features two sorro's agile switches which are not cherry MX I know that's a deal-breaker for some of you but it does have a few tricks up its mechanical sleeve to make it more enticing so why don't we go ahead and dive right in to see what makes this keyboard so special let's check it out check it out now alright so here's the keyboard it's got some backlit LEDs 16.8 million colors Oh Matt so many to choose from although my eyes can really only ever see about eight of them so there's that but you do get your options there well we'll dig into the software in just a bit however you can see that we've got this white very clean kind of pristine looking light on the LEDs on going you see we've got this really nice white aesthetic here there aren't too many keyboards that do this they're just completely white I feel a bit conflicted about this one part of me is like yeah all white its unique it's cool the other half of me is like this is gonna look awful in like a few weeks after my grimy hands have been you know typing away on keys you know I'm opening boxes everyday that you know are in the mail they're all dusty and dirty and stuff and then I go ahead and type on the keys that might really mess this up very quickly so bear that in mind if you are going to go with this white version they do offer a black version as well and I think that's probably going to be a lot more forgiving when it comes to wear and tear and dirt buildup and that sort of thing also you do get some variety of switches these are the agile Reds and I can take this off even though you can't really see from there maybe I'll cut to some b-roll or something these feature agile red switches these keyboards will also come in blue black or brown switches so you have your pick there now let me break it down for you what's different about these agile switches and how they compare to their cherry MX red counterparts so first off the actuation distance and the travel distance on the agile switches is actually a bit shorter than it is on Cherry MX red so for actuation distance we get 1.5 millimeters which means you only need to press the key 1.5 millimeters down until it actuates the keystroke and sends the signal where as Cherry MX Reds I believe is 2 millimetres right so that's that's a bit longer that you have to go down in order for it to depress or to actuate I should say for bottoming out your travel distance total on the agile switches is 3.5 millimeters so that's basically from the very top to the very bottom bottoming out the key whereas on the Cherry MX Reds it's four millimeters so you do have to go a little bit further down now it's a personal preference thing some people like that extra actuation distance or that travel distance I should say because it's just it's more tactile and I would tend to agree with that I feel like these keys are not quite as tactile because of that reason as something like the cherry MX Reds however they do seem to be a bit quicker when you press them down because you're not actually having to bottom out the keys quite as far so that's kind of a nice feature there Tesoro is advertising the gram spectrum to be the fastest mechanical keyboard with the fastest switches I don't know if that's necessarily true I mean if you take a look at the Cherry MX speed switches which are exclusively on the Corsair k70 rapid-fire right now those have an actuation distance of one point two millimeters so that's actually 0.3 millimeters faster than the agile Reds here at least given that particular specification so as far as like typing though if you're if you're talking like subjective review stuff here like what do I actually think of the typing I think it's it's actually pretty nice like the typing experience the gaming experience I played half an hour of doom with this thing and once you get used to the shorter travel distance I think that's the biggest kind of thing that you have to get used to it actually works really well and it's comfortable my typing experience has been fairly positive on it so far not really too many complaints there again it's just going to rely heavily on preference and how much you're in doctrine into the Cherry MX universe where you know is it going to be too much of a change going to something like these agile switches the X have low profile key caps as well so these key caps are half as tall as like most standard issue key caps so I guess that also kind of provides a different feel again something you might have to get used to I'm not a I'm not a huge I'm not a huge fan of them nor am I like hating on them either I just I think that you know they don't do much for me but they're there some people might prefer them just for the aesthetic thing it kind of gives your keyboard a lot slimmer of an appearance which kind of might jive well for your style and tastes so there's that rattling off some other fun specs here you get sixty million keystrokes per key as well as a 1,000 Hertz polling rate and 100% anti-ghosting with full six or any key roll overs so you can pretty much smash your face against this thing and every single key that your face hits will be actuated because we've all been in that situation where you're smashing your face against your keyboard it happens it happens all the time you've also got a very nice detachable cable here it's six foot braided USB and look at this it's a mini USB connector which I really really appreciate over the micro USB just because there's a bit more rigidity to it so that's a big plus for me as far as the keyboard itself the construction is super well built I mean build quality is top-notch here the key caps are double injection they look really nice at least on the day of unboxing wait until I eat some Cheetos first and then go on a typing rampage the body itself is actually really solid as well I mean there's like zero flex it's completely sturdy it's got a plastic housing but an internal metal base across the entire thing so it gives this really nice heft to it so it doesn't slide around additionally to help with that I'd leave on the underbelly we do have some some some stuff here we've got some rubber padding which again for anti slip stuff as I've sang saying stuff a lot saying stuff way too much and you've got these little flip-out feet to flip out feets which give it actually at a decent angle a nice incline for a more ergonomic typing and those feet actually have rubberized pads on them as well so just to aid in the non slippage in the top right corner here you get a Tesoro logo which thankfully isn't too intrusive right beside three LED indicators in blue now I wish these were either white something more color neutral to match with your theme the theme of your desk or if you could just configure them all together two different colors in the software match and tie in with your with your color scheme and stuff unfortunately you're stuck with blue what can you do these are representing your caps lock and unlock and gaming mode so this keyboard can actually switch between PC mode and gaming mode gaming mode essentially enables any kind of preset macros that you've configured in the software by the way you can also record macros on-the-fly from your hardware itself just start a recording session with the home button and then you're on your way to recording a macro simply by tapping some keys which is kind of cool the other thing that gaming mode does is it disables your Windows key so you know you don't back out of the game unexpectedly take a look at our F Keys up here first off you've got five profile Keys f1 through f5 you have five different profiles that you can switch between again your windows lock keys f6 f7 through f12 are your multimedia keys now one small gripe I have here is that you get you know your volume up and down keys which is fine better than nothing but I've gotten so used to having a volume knob on the k70 RGB that it's just it's super convenient and I think at this sort of price point for a mechanical keyboard especially if you've got a number pad in there and it's not a super compact keyboard then it should have some kind of volume knob or volume wheel because it's just super convenient especially when you're in the heat of battle and you need to turn something up or down someone comes in the room whatever I've gotten really really used to it again this is huge personal preference but that is how I feel about it so on that note before we hop into the software and I show you what that all entails I kind of want to show you guys what is possible on the keyboard itself without ever loading up the software because there are a couple things you can do here for example if you hold function and you tap on the up and down arrows you can change the brightness there's four different levels of brightness on the backlighting as well as off so you can of course and disable it all together if you wish but via brightest level is super bright and honestly the RGB implementation like the LEDs on this keyboard are some of the best I've seen I said this about the last Tesoro keyboard I reviewed almost a year ago or so that it was just a cut above everything else this is honestly nicer backlighting then the K 70 rapid-fire it's it seriously is in a league of its own and I do commend Tesoro on that achievement however we're going to see what else it can do here so let's go ahead and check got some of the other modes so I believe this one this is kind of yours they have names and stuff fun names trigger so this is probably just you know Firefly we'll call this one Firefly you tap it it lights up for a second and then it goes away beautiful this is kind of a ripple effect we're pretty familiar with this one boom boom boom how do we got here and I'm basically just holding down function and doing left and right on the arrow keys this time this is called firework or fireworks if I remember correctly and it kind of does like this a OE thing where it lights up the surrounding adjacent keys just kind of cool you also got this is like Glaser you 2qq breathing of course it wouldn't be an RGB keyboard with fancy LED effects if it didn't have a breathing mode and then of course you have the very nice pretty one this is the spectrum mode or a rainbow way whatever they call it and it doesn't have any kind of reactive properties it's just boom it's just boom and then there's this one which it kind of looks like a game gaming mode sort of thing where you've got your WASD and surrounding keys all lit up pretty much the right-half the keyboard is completely out but there you guys have it that's pretty much what you can do from the keyboard in terms of illumination now we can go ahead and jump into the software and see what kind of finer tuning we can do with that as well as things like macros and stuff so let's quickly dive into that alright gel so here we are in the software and holy smokes look at how small this font is just geez geez gee whiz super tiny I mean I've got that gonna do to a grass I got a good vision and I still have a hard time seeing this little stuff sync program macro setting I can't imagine like any old ladies who were rocking the gram spectrum right now please get out the telescope late us I can't see a damn thing in this software so um yeah I don't know if there's like some sort of UI scale or the good scale up the font maybe that big let it go any cool look in the mid to sorrel but getting back on topic here let's see let's we're gonna mess with profile 1 everyone click the tilde key it will be our little guinea pig for today and you can see all these options here you got options so you got a macro you can write a name for the macro you can record and do some keys you can stop you can change oh my god look at the font it's even tinier here what the hell what does that even say set selected items to 50 millisecond gee I I can't read this at all Tesoro this is unacceptable I can't like enlarge the window or anything I can't even move the window this is just not good not good guys but yeah ok I'm gonna go ahead and change this to what I think is 25 milliseconds according to my eyesight change that you can change all that you know you can you can select them all you can select none you can delete them if you want delete them if you want insert a single key insert a copy item you can have the macro repeat as many times as you like you can have it repeat continuously while pressed or repeat continuously until the key is pressed again press ok and next time I hit the tilde key in the appropriate environment it'll do all those keystrokes that I put in there earlier so that's nice key assignment it's kind of like a boring macro I mean basically just Jay this used to be a tilde key and now it's the number 5 there you go that's that's special right exciting sync program so what this is is so you know how we've got different profile modes here you've got five different user user defined profiles well it can be kind of annoying if you've got different profiles for different applications like you've got one profile for Battlefield you got one profile for h1z1 well basically this function allows you to switch profiles on the fly so as soon as you launch up a program it will switch over to the profile that you've assigned it to that way you don't have to manually switch it every time even though it is pretty easy doing it on the fly with those F keys up at the top of the keyboard it is much easier just just to have it all done for you so that's a pretty cool feature there again you've got disable default put your key back to its default setting that it shipped with and then there's launch programs so if you wanted to you could assign a key to open up a program of your choice which is kind of cool as well really quick before we move on you do have the option to export or import profiles there is 512 kilobits of onboard memory and this is a this is all being like powered by a 32 bits cortex premium processor that's going to handle all your led stuff all the macros and things like that so moving right along to LED effects here I believe these are the seven or eight different presets that we looked at earlier so you can slow them of course through the software itself there's also spectrum colors which again is is lighting up your WASD Keys for gaming and the in the surrounding keys so you can have that breathe you can have it apply a static color where it just stays static or you can do trigger which is kind of the more reactive touch to type effect like so so that's fun over here you get illumination I'll only exit out of here illumination and it says select a backlit color so let's do red apply boom and there's red looks fairly accurate looks a little on the pinkish side I did notice that when going to white and applying that it does look fairly pink I'm not sure how it's coming across to you guys on camera but here from here it looks very pinkish I think that could be maybe because there's some red housing underneath the key caps as we saw earlier which I wasn't a huge fan of especially not if it's affecting our LED color so what you could do is potentially I don't know cool it down a little bit by by applying just a little wee bit of blueness that that seems to help a little bit you kind of have to get the right shade of blue I did it earlier I did it earlier I promise not a little dogs too blue now that's too blue but and here's another problem that I have with the keyboard see this looks good this is nice and white looks looks much cooler much more true to being white however um this little color bar here in the software is all you get that's your color picker right there and it's very tiny and it's really hard to be precise I mean if you wanted to really go through all 16.8 million colors it would be quite a tedious task to say the least of course you do have some preset colors here which I don't believe you can swap out for for colors of your choice let's say there's like a custom color that you wanted to save to one of these I don't think that's an option here so fairly limited on how you can actually pick and choose your various color options which good there's some room for improvement here but apart from that it works well again the LEDs themselves physically are some of the nicest I've seen on any mechanical keyboard the software on the other hand could use quite a bit of work so on that note before we close out this video why don't we go ahead and fire up a quick little sound test comparing the agile Reds which is on the gram spectrum to the Cherry MX red switches on my Corsair k70 RGB now the last thing I wanted to mention about this keyboard is the price which is a hundred and forty dollars USD at least at the time of filming this video on amazon.com so that positions it kind of you know in the high end I mean it's not the most expensive mechanical keyboard that we've seen I mean the k70 RGB rapid-fire is 165 I think on Amazon right now that's twenty-five dollars more than what you pay for this granted you get cherry MX keys which a lot of you just need you just need that cherry MX in your life zero zero tolerance for anything else which I completely understand but you kind of just have to value you know figure out what your priorities are in a mechanical keyboard what I would do is potentially find a way to try this out see how you like it with typing and gaming make sure you game on it too because the experience there can be completely different than writing an email or typing on a Word document for example so make sure you try it out to see if you are a fan of the low profile switches of these agile Reds you know honestly it's a really high-quality keyboard Tesoro has done a nice job of making it feel like a premium product which it is and the LED backlighting again I can't really rant and rave about that enough however the software again should be improved Tesoro I can't can't read anything I just can't see anything so just make make those changes and then get back to me and I'll be I'll be happy cool and everything else I said just make everything just do what I say all the time ah that's pretty much gonna wrap it up for this video guys again sorry for the loose and unscripted format hopefully that was okay and thank you all for watching this here video be sure to give me a like on it toss me a like if you enjoyed it also feel free to let me know what you think of this keyboard in the comments below before you go don't forget to test me know I already said that whoa deja vu I'm going crazy check out my store where I'm selling shirts and hoodies and merchandise and things like that more items will be added to the store in the near future so stay tuned for all that and subscribe to the channel if you haven't already thank you all for watching and I will see you all in the next video