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Printed On: | May 13, 2008, 6:10 am |
| Category: | Peripherals | |
| Type: | Reviews | |
| Posted By: | yantronic | |
| Date Posted: | December 13, 2007, 1:05 am |
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A Glow Job Delivered
It's a no brainer that Razer currently holds the crown for popularity amongst gaming enthusiasts. Their range of HIDs and gaming surfaces are world renowed for a good reason. Under Razer's wings is yet another household brand of gaming devices: Everglide. It is indeed heartening to see both innovators under the same unbrella.
Most of the time, the courier tends to bring more dread than excitement to our overworked Team of reviewers, but to have a HID on the charts was a somewhat refreshing change. In the era where global warming is taking precedence in politics, kudos goes to Everglide for keeping the pakaging of the DKTBoard clean and simple. No unnecessary accesories, no weird plastic globules keeping things in place, no funny contraptions that won't be used 99% of the time.
After gawking over the packaging, we fingered the new toy till it popped. Out came a sleek aluminum-panelled keyboard. Not only did this new-kid-in-town exude a touch of class, it's actually petite compared to standard 105 key QWERTYs that oldschool geeks are used to.
You readers probably game a fair share, and chances are you've survived at least a LANparty to live and tell the tale to your other gamer comrades. When you're lugging a souped up Chieftec around with terabytes of data, you're sure to value space savers like the DKTBoard. Not that a longer keyboard actually weighs significantly more, but a longer keyboard has more exposed keys to be banged around. Definitely not a pretty sight when you're dead tired after days of intense non-stop fraggin' action.
Put next to a mobile phone like the Sony Ericsson K800i, the DKTBoard actually makes the phone look fat. Of course, the next thing to do was to plug the DKTBoard into a test rig.
Lo and behold! The keys are floating on a bed of blue! The blue theme actually extends to the indication lamps. At the top right edge is a push-button switch that disables the bling for more solemn users.
The light for the keys actually comes from a diffuser molding located below the keys. The even lighting is something that is seldom seen in lesser lighted keyboards. They keys are also double moulded, meaning a transparent layer was fused below an opaque black layer, something that you'll see only in high-end keyboards as it is more expensive to implement as compared to the normal silkscreened letterings you see on cheap keyboards. With that, gamers can say goodbye to fading keys with the DKTBoard. Hurray!
The DKTBoard is a wired USB design, with shortcut keys located conveniently above the number keys. A definite plus is the volume shortcuts that are particularly useful in-game. No more pain trying to switch out to Windows mid-game for turning down the volume while your family member picks up a call.
On the rear is a pair of standoffs that actually give a reassuring click as it twists into place. A nice touch indeed.
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Getting Touchy: How it Feels
The DKTBoard has a rather unique key-travel. Unlike short key-travel laptop keyboards, the DKTBoard actually offers tactility and feedback that makes typing a joy. This review is typed on the DKTBoard and I've been losing a quite a few typo-errors along the way. Not a bad sign for a poor typist like myself. Another interesting thing was the way the keyboard that actually stayed on the table surface. A lot of keyboards do not have the traction to stay on the surface to deal with lateral forces that comes from typing. No finger is truly, vertically, pistonic after all. Gamers will love to know the fact that the keyboard remains responsive when hammered with many simultaneous keystrokes, I had a great time pwning the ass out of my geekmates in our VR-Zone geekpad! 6 keys pressed at once is no problems at all!
Then again, if you were bionic man, with pistonic touch-typing fingers, you shouldn't be reading this.
The position of some of the function keys on the DKTBoard deviates from that of more traditional designs, and does take some time to accustom to. All these in maximum effort by Razer to compact the load of lanpartyers. Otherwise, the Everglide is essentially problem free, with nothing acting up during our period of use. I refrain from using flawless to describe this keyboard simply because there still exists some room for improvement. The USB cable could for example take on a Techflex sleeve (as used on the Logitech G5) to provide some form of strain relief for the PVC insulated cable.
For gracing my work desk, churning out this review, and aiding my navigation through Shangri-La, the DKTBoard gets away with 80 VRMarks. Your mileage may vary, so for those who've tried the DKTBoard and detest it, here's a message I'd love to share with Razer. ;)
Picture credits to Razer =D
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