Oh, what a bloody beautiful thing – I’ve only had it for a few hours now and sure enough there are little niggles with it, coming from a well laid out Saitek Eclipse II… other aspects make up for it immensely though, primarily the action on the mechanical keys. Now I know what I’ve been missing!

For a few months now I’ve been eyeing mechanical keyboards, and after looking at the state of my Saitek Eclipse II… the bullet was finally bitten and I’m not the contempt owner of the aforementioned Razer BlackWidow keyboard. It has a number of useful features of course, but I want to get the few niggles out of the way first – and they are minor things really.

So, one of the nice features of the Eclipse II was the capslock key’s design, it had a little stepped section on its right, where it meets the a key… this allows for some easy touch identification of “gone too far”, this keyboard lacks such a simple design feature. The 5 extra macro keys also are quite close in proximity to the main keyset, leading to occasional miss identification of the shift or backslash keys – once again something I’m sure I will get used to eventually.

Otherwise, it sounds beautiful, looks gorgeous and types wonderful too. It makes me want to program like a crazy fool just to keep typing. I’m just hoping the key prints don’t wear down quickly (rather than the ink going right through the keys for lasting endurance, it looks to be printed/stuck on afterwards). Its glossy finish seems fairly easy to clean at least, and the simple design lends itself well to a few quick wipes.

The keys have a rough texture, so I suspect they might smooth out eventually – and likely with the amount of gaming I do that’ll be the w,a,s,d cluster as the first victims along with the space bar. The keyboard does lack back-lighting, but given my experience of the wear on my Eclipse II I’m not really looking for that as a feature ever again; the plastic peeling off on the keys being a rather unattractive outcome of that design.

The BlackWidow (not Ultimate) is also amongst the cheaper mechanical keyboards, and they sound gorgeous (note they are like quiet typewriters of old, a video below (not me) shows off the audio sound, quite relaxing for me). Although admittedly it sounds less noisy than that video in my own setup – sounds like he might be a heavy typer.