How To Ask for Help When Buying a Keyboard
Figure 1: This is the keyboard of someone (0range) who clearly knows how to ask proper questions. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been lurking around the channels of a couple of different entry level keyboard forums and I have to admit that the experience is quite bleak. I’m not saying this because of “toxicity” or people being given wrong information, rather I see so many people’s questions going unanswered… and to be honest they’re kind of to blame for it. While I recognize that not everyone coming freshly into the keyboard space enters it with the same level of inquisitiveness that I did when I first joined back in 2017, these questions going unanswered really feel way under-thought or over-thought compared to where I was. On one hand, you get questions like this: What is best gaming keyboard? And on the other hand, you get questions like this: Hi, there everyone! I am just now starting to look into mechanical keyboards as an avid gamer and I need some help in...
Aug 28, 2024
Materials
Plastic vs Metal Broadly speaking, most mechanical keyboards will either be “plastic” or “metal”; of course, the specific plastic or metal of choice will impact how a board feels, but these are the two main categories. Most beginner and/or mass-market keyboards are made of plastic while most boutique or custom boards are metal. After all, if you’re going through the effort of designing and manufacturing a small production run keyboard, why not go all-out on the material? Manufacturing/setup time accounts for most of the unit cost of CNC-milled products anyway. Most newcomers to the hobby have their eyes set on a nice metal keyboard as a “someday” purchase, and rightly so. The extra weight and premium feel is certainly appealing and an indication of build quality. Keep in mind, however, that the case material has a huge effect on the sound of a keyboard, and in many cases a more basic plastic case can sound better than its metal counterpart without modification. Metal
Plastic
Types of Metal
Aluminum By far the most common type of metal used in custom and semi-custom keyboards is aluminum. There are slightly different grades of aluminum used, but you’ll never notice a difference between them. One nice benefit of aluminum is that it can be anodized to a variety of colors, giving a quality finish and appearance that won’t chip off. Aside from anodization, there are a whole host of other finishing techniques that are commonly used when producing keyboards, which will be covered in a future article. Steel/Titanium Second and third to aluminum (in no particular order - if anyone has actually tracked this, let me know) are steel and titanium. Both are harder to machine than aluminum, and come with their own processing difficulties that make them far more niche than aluminum. Titanium is also expensive, so there’s that too. Brass The last metal that I’ll mention is brass, and it’s mentioned last because it’s more often used for plates and weights than entire keyboard cases. Brass is very dense, adding a nice heft to otherwise “light” aluminum cases, and the coloring can provide a nice accent as a plate material. Differentiating between all these materials in terms of pure quality is pretty dicey, since most of it comes down to personal preference. Brass weights are generally considered to be more desired than alternatives, and truthfully I think aluminum has so solidly dominated the case landscape that you’d be hard-pressed to find anything else not on the fringes. Types of Plastic