- This is not a technical review that goes into all the gory details. There’s no science involved. This is just me wanting to contribute a little bit by writing a review or two from a little bit of a different angle
- I have no interest towards photography nor cameras, so please forgive me my bad photos
- I’ve planned on writing about all of my current and future keyboards but if (most of) you think this is just a complete waste of storage and couldn’t care less, please let me know
I received this beautiful aluminum Apple keyboard. It didn’t take me too long to realize that this particular input device was actually one of the worst keyboards I had ever typed on (obviously I can’t remember them all .. but still..) I just kept typoing on it all the time, especially due to the fact that pressing the keys felt really stiff and unbalanced and a lot of my keypresses went unregistered. I didn’t know much about keyboards nor did I put much focus on them, but this awful experience with this particular Apple aluminum keyboard really kept bothering me. My typoing didn’t see any improvement. I talked about it with my colleagues and then one guy said “hey, you should get a Das Keyboard...”
Some weeks later, while typoing again, I found myself googling around for Das Keyboard and I stumbled upon OCN Mechanical Keyboard Guide which I found … fascinating! I still think, that the OCN guide is a great entry-level guide into keyboards. After OCN, I went on to discover GeekHack forums and Deskthority. Pre-ripster-ban-GeekHack Wikis were awesome! I was still thinking that paying +100€ for a keyboard was ridiculous but then again, I had already started to get sick and tired of all the things that just wouldn’t properly do what they were supposed to and also like Mr. Interface keeps telling us, keyboard is truly an important tool for my craft - the software development - so why not invest on it. I was going for it! I wanted to buy a Das Keyboard. But... I couldn’t find any shop to sell and ship it to Finland! Those that would’ve shipped it, didn’t have it in stock. OCN guide said that Cherry MX blues were best for typing, Ducky had blues and OCN had links to TankGuys and I went for it. I found Ducky. I found good reviews about it and bought it!
Ducky Shine DK9008S arrived after Christmas. It costed me $186 with shipping. Plus it got stuck in the customs. Plus I just had to take a taxi to the airport to rescue it from the evil customs officers. I was like a little boy with a new toy on a Christmas eve.
Ducky quality begins from the top.
The packaging. I think it’s simply excellent. All the information and more is on the box, without funy Engrish. The keyboard is covered with a plastic dust cover and tucked into a neat Ducky “velvet” bag. Pure awesomeness here.
The keyboard itself is likewise very well built. It’s heavy (around 1,5kg), the case is solid, it doesn’t bend, it doesn’t squeak and it’s perfectly balanced on the desk. The keys don’t wobble and so forth. I find the Overclock.net logo on the space bar quite nice and the Ducky logo a bit lame... They should have a logo contest
Feature wise, it’s top notch; detachable cable (even with a nice Ducky text on the plug), DIP switches for tweaking modifier keys, adjustable backlighting, adjustable PS/2 key repeat, media shortcut keys, NKRO via PS/2, 6KRO via USB, PS/2-USB adapter, keycap puller and a manual. The green extra WASD keycaps turned out to be higher in profile than the regular keycaps so I couldn’t use them, that was a bit of a drag.
I’ve been using computers since the age of 3 or 4 but for the first time, I was like consciously focusing on the keyboard. I was quite amazed of...
- The Cherry MX blue switch clicking sound. I had read horror stories of a loud, like-IBM-noisy clicks but the sound turned out to be much higher pitched and softer than I had expected
- How little force was required. It was quite astonishing. How could something “mechanical” be so much lighter and pleasing than something made of “rubber” ?
- How easy it was to switch from Finnish layout to US layout. Much better for coding, there’s no turning back now
- How I started to feel how mushy and... and ponderous all the usual supermarket keyboards were
- That there was no turning back. I was hooked. I even got addicted to keyboardporn.com
! Mine also got stuck in custons and also had to pay another 30bucks which sucked...