I discovered Mechanical Keyboards.

For years, I refused to acknowledge the existence of mechanical keyboards and the large, loyal following of mechanical keyboard enthusiasts they attract. They reminded me of those old, yellow monstrosities that were prolific in the 80s and 90s. Their stupid clacky sounds gave me anxiety and given that I work in shared office environments, I could never imagine my coworkers accepting the distraction willfully. Nope, membrane is life. They’re affordable and I could bang away at the keys for ages without annoying anyone further than the guy that sat next to me.

For equally as long, I mostly used Mac keyboards and I liked the way their short key presses made my fingers ‘float’ over the keyboard. Its not that I was a fanboy (I was, kinda) either, but I always had a PC companion for gaming. I’ve been building PCs since the early “00s so I’ve had a good number of keyboards clickety-clacking their way through my life. They were all membrane. In 2014, I got myself a legendary Logitech G19. It had a cult following and If I had to admit, the LCD screen was the major selling point for me. It allowed 3rd party software to display content on it and I used AIDA64 to built a little UI that allowed me to monitor my system while gaming or processing heavy workloads. Paired with the huge number of macro keys – it served me well as a gaming keyboard and as an occasional work keyboard too.

At present, in 2020, after years of use and abuse – the A and D keys started sticking at critical moments (like when a gang of criminals are counting on me during an intense GTAV heist) and got progressively worse until one day the A key just gave up the ghost. Membrane keyboards are not very repairable and most certainly not one that was released a decade prior and long reached end-of-life. It couldn’t have happened at a worse time too, it packed up during the time our country, South Africa, was in lockdown to prevent the spread of COVID-19. I was working from home and my options were really limited given that most retailers were closed.

In a way, it was a good thing because it forced me to research the limited available options and that research step yielded an unexpected but critical piece of information that I was ignoring for a long time that was undeniable and consistent – Membrane keyboards are dead and mechanical keyboards are life. Wearing this new lens, I started looking in to the mechanical keyboards a bit more seriously. With the clackiness of mechanical keyboards being my biggest concern, I started with reading up on the different types of switches and what they all meant.

World renowned german switch maker, Cherry MX set the standard that all other manufacturers follow – there are a few different colours and they all have different characteristics but I will focus on the Reds, Browns and Blues as those were my available options. Gamers the world over will swear by Cherry MX Reds – they offer fast response and minimal resistance. The blues are more suited to typing with a bit more resistance but a very audible click – something I want to avoid. Now the browns – this is more my speed – a blend of Red and Blue, they offer medium response, a tactile bump and no loud click. A good balance between gaming and typing which I use my PC for mostly. I actually ended up with switches from Otemu

Now that I now what type of switch to get, I had other options to wade through. Tenkeyless or full? Media keys? Removeable switches? Do I even need that level of choice? Of course I did. But wow… so many options. I was beginning to feel a little overwhelmed. The research took a while.. I’m not one to impulsively buy something I have to live so closely with on a long-term basis. It was a big choice. I decided to go with a full keyboard layout and it had to have media keys. Backlighting was another nice-to-have but all the solid options came in ridiculous colours so it had to be RGB. For the record, I’m not really that in to RGB but I wanted the ability to match the keyboard with my PC’s black-and-white colour theme. Another thing Mech keyboards offer: customisation. Membranes dont offer this – you get what you get.

When I finally found a retailer with stock and the ability to ship, I placed my order on a Thursday and had to wait about 4 days for my delivery. Couriers were prioritizing emergency deliveries for essential services so I’d unfortunately missed the last pickup for the week. I settled (with limited options) on Redragon’s K556 Devarajas mechanical 102 key gaming keyboard with Otemu Brown switches. Not one to venture away from the tried-and-trusted big brands I usually stick to, the K556 offered some practical features that some of the more established brands didnt offer.

For starters, it met all my requirements – full 102 US layout, Removeable switches, Media keys, Cherry MX compatible keycaps and RGB. It even came with 8 spare switches which is great. They’re all browns, I was expecting blues for the WASD and arrow keys but its no big deal. I quite enjoy the browns. They also came supplied with both the cap and switch pulling tools.

The keyboard features an aluminium frame which adds a nice weight to it and although the caps are ever so wiggly, they keys are great to type and game on. This is something I could live with for the foreseeable future. Setup was a breeze and most of the RGB options are configurable from the keyboard itself. I’ve been using it for a few days now and so far I’m quite impressed. It might be because I set the bar too low all these years but I feel like I’ve cheated myself out of some cool stuff all this while. I’m definitely more open to mechanical keyboards now. So much so that I’m looking into an ultra-customisable Ducky keyboard for work – to replace the ageing wired Apple keyboard my hands find themselves attached to for most of my week. That’s another piece of equipment I’ve hung on to for far too long. It’s time has come…

One strange thing with this board, however, is that it does some strange stuff to my Mac… I hooked it up to my 2018 Macbook 15″ and it caused the fans to spin up for no apparent reason. This was a surprise to me, because it takes a lot to get those fans going – I only ever hear them when I’m rendering 3D or video so having them spin up at idle like that was cause for concern. Activity monitor showed the IOReg process maxing out a CPU core.. some googling pointed to the process having something to do with I/O. This doesn’t bug me all that much, the keyboard isn’t claimed to me Mac compatible – but that was a weird one. It still functioned perfectly aside from the overactive fans.

UPDATE:

Sadly, the Redragon lasted a few months before the top row of keys (Esc and F1 through to pause) stopped working. The supplier was only open to replacing it with another of the same so I decided to take some time to do some proper research, dig a little deeper and spring for a premium mechanical board that wouldn’t die on me in a few months.