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Our First Reverse Dye-sub Keycap Set
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keyboard_arrow_downKenshiro70
137
Aug 4, 2023
Would it be possible to do a backlit set this way? Perhaps a pudding-like translucent one. That would remove the need for the "stencil font" compromise that many double-shot versions use. Or is the work not worth the tradeoff versus doing a high-quality double-shot set?
Vandenhul
247
Aug 5, 2023
Kenshiro70Not exactly. PBT is not translucent. What you can do though is add Glow-in-the-dark dye to make the PBT plastic glow from LEDs. Combine with a dark reverse dye-sub, you can get glowing legends like on KAT Cyberspace. DSA Minuteman is an example where the whole PBT cap glows.
Kenshiro70
137
Aug 5, 2023
VandenhulThat was wonderfully informative. Thanks so much! Those Cyberspace keycaps look beautiful. I'm pretty sure I have the Godspeed R1 glow-in-the-dark version, and those were fun, but I've really fallen in love with the MT3 profile.
(Edited)
Aristarco
210
Aug 2, 2023
I hope the new set has an international subset that includes Spanish keycaps, specially Latin American Spanish, like the dev/tty/ set.
HarvestDay
141
Keyboard Club Member
Aug 1, 2023
There seems to be a lot of trade-offs here in terms of alignment and surface imperfections given the price point. If more color combinations was the end goal, I wish the money and effort had just gone towards fixing and extending the worn-down ABS tooling instead.
(Edited)
eapdang
585
Keyboard Club Member
Aug 2, 2023
think he's referring to recent MT3 ABS sets with not so great legends, IIRC especially the F-row. Matt3o was gathering as many cases in the wild as possible to get in touch with you guys at Drop.
Vandenhul
247
Aug 3, 2023
HarvestDayGiven how good Dye-sub can get with KAT and KAM, I much prefer a reverse dye-sub PBT to even doubleshot PBT.
You can get a much broader range of typefaces, and do thinner lines with dye-sub than you can with double-shot. So you can have serif fonts or more intricate designs for legends.
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What is Dye-sub? We covered this in our article about keycap materials, but a quick reminder before diving into what makes reverse dye-sub unique—dye-sub (dye sublimation) legends are legends which have been physically dyed into a PBT keycap, leaving a sub-surface legend that is incredibly resilient to wear and tear. Because you can’t dye a lighter color onto a darker color effectively, dye-sub keycaps have always required a lighter keycap base color than legend color. This is why most dye-sub sets are <color>-on-beige, sometimes spicing things up with a white, yellow, or other light color as the base keycap color.
What is Reverse Dye-sub? To work around the above limitations, it’s long been discussed that in theory, one could simply dye the *rest* of the keycap (dye the base, not the legend) using the dye-sub technique. This would leave the legend of the keycap an untouched lighter color, and create the desired effect of a light color on dark color keycap. Simple in theory, not-so-simple in execution. In order to dye the keycaps at scale, films covered with dye are stretched slightly to cover all applicable surfaces of the cap and ensure complete coverage across the contours of the non-flat keycap. For regular dye-sub processing, this is much more simple, since we’re only dyeing the top surface. Any stretching that is taking place is mostly minimal. In order to dye the entire outer surface of a keycap during reverse dye-sublimation, the film covered with dye needs to stretch to cover the entire surface of the keycap. This presents difficulties and hurdles to overcome to tool up for manufacturing, as well as challenges specific to each color and quality control. As you can imagine, stretching something lengthwise causes it to thin out—this thinning results in lighter colors applied to the product where the film is stretched more than where it’s not. We can combat this with heavier coatings overall (to minimize the difference) and scaling the coating thickness proportionally in the areas that will thin more.
What to expect from Reverse Dye-sub For some more details and specific examples of what to expect from the reverse dye-sub manufacturing process, please see the talk post ‘What to Expect from Reverse Dye-sub Keycaps’. Our next reverse dye-sub keycap sets? What are your favorite light-on-dark keycap sets that you’d like to see us produce with reverse dye-sub next?