Gadgetory

Linus tech tips coverage of CES 2014 is brought to you by NCI XCOM your source for great technology selection and service along with Corsair memory and Western Digital this you guys is not your average Corsair k70 keyboard this is the world's first fully RGB backlit mechanical keyboard featuring Cherry MX switches now you might say to me Linus we have tons of RGB backlit keyboards why would we care about mechanical in which case I would direct you to any of the other videos that we've ever made about why mechanical keyboards are vastly superior and particularly Cherry MX is a favorite of all the staff here at Linus tech tips so you cannot replicate the quality at least from what we've tried in the past with other differently branded switches it just doesn't really happen they're still manufactured in Germany and there's not much stuff you can say that about these days all right so onto this keyboard first up well okay it's RGB backlit second up what I was kind of expecting to see was programmable backlighting and you could just kind of change the full backlight to any color maybe like WASD zone to go along with one of the other zones or something like that what we got is probably one of the most complex one of the most complex keyboards ever I mean they're actually using a digital signage processor from Panasonic the first time this has ever been implemented in a consumer-grade device in order to drive what is effectively an LED display I mean that's what this processors for it's for digital signage large format LED displays and that's what we're looking at here so I've seen sixteen point eight million color RGB backlit keyboards that really when you tinker around with them and you configure all the settings in the in the you know the color dials is probably more like 256 colors that is not the case here we have an extremely wide variety we've also got okay alright let's talk about the LED reliability so you've got all these colors and one of the things that I was really concerned about when I first heard about this keyboard was you see you see LEDs die I have a K 90 that's got a dead LED on it's like yeah it still works just find the keys which works but it's not perfect anymore and that doesn't make me happy so what I was informed of is that they're using a completely different method of mounting the LEDs in order to dramatically increase reliability now the way that leds on keyboards apparently usually die is actually from ESD so electrostatic discharge and by mounting the leds within the key switch rather than to the PCB of the keyboard you can virtually eliminate that so in spite of the fact that the LEDs are much more complex we should still be looking at a situation where it's very difficult for them to fail even over an extended period of time now in terms of lighting patterns courser has pretty much everything under the sun you can do your standard you know wave or breathing or fully lit here or color zones or individual colors on each key or you can have you know reactive reactive fade-ins and fade-outs and you can adjust the timing of that or like you know laser beams friggin zapping across the thing and they have a very complex piece of software that's going to launch at the same time of this this keyboard that's going to allow you to configure a lot of that stuff don't worry there will be like an easy beginners mode for just like well I just want an orange keyboard can I just have that no one's ever made an orange LED backlit keyboard before why can't I have that if you want that then that's still just fine or you can do some of the more advanced stuff or because they're keeping the software architecture open you can even code your own way of lighting up the keyboard and have it do whatever you could possibly want you can share that with friends and courser is encouraging the modding community to just kind of take charge and run away with it if that's what they want to do in addition to being fully programmable in terms of the lighting every single key on the keyboard is fully programmable we've seen this with SteelSeries is latest SteelSeries engine software and it's something that I'm personally very excited about I think it's great so not only could you remap one to seven if you wanted to you could remap it to control seven so you can do macros you can do straight remap things whatever you want every key on the keyboard can be changed into something else if you prefer it that way now of course the question you're going to be asking me now is Linus how many hundreds of dollars am I going to have to pay for it and Corsair is being very wishy-washy about it they won't tell me a straight price I was like okay tell me this here's our 200 is it 250 and they said okay we won't tell you but we will tell you that there are RGB backlit membrane keyboards that will cost more than this which to me means under 200 although I could be wrong but I hope I'm right because if this comes in around 150 to 170 I think it is a knockout punch to pretty much anyone who is not delivering such an advanced LED backlit mechanical keyboard it's going to be available in red switches black switches and - no not black switches red switches brown switches and blue switches at the start and so that addresses one of my other complaints about Corsair keyboards and that's that they seem to always lead with red and I'm more of a brown guy so there you go guys if you've always wanted an Easter themed keyboard Corsair will be delivering it sometime this year don't miss any of our CES 2014 coverage here guys our trip to the show is powered by NCI XCOM your source for great technology selection and service as well as our other sponsors Corsair which has nothing to do with why I'm raving about this keyboard if you guys will notice I was actually raving about this before I even seen it yet because I was super excited and a Western Digital big thanks to those guys for allowing us to be here