About That New Keyboard

So I've been using this new keyboard for a while now and thought it was time to do a more through review (which I had promised on an earlier blog post).

It's a Rosewill RK-9100BR, translated that s a mechanical, illuminated keyboard using Cheery MX Brown switches.  These are the silent version of the Blue switches so these have tactile feedback but no clicky sound.  I should note that the keyboard is not silent, and that a rubber dome type keyboard is probably more quiet .

Plus the keys are individually illuminated by an LED - a blue LED in this particular model.  There are three illumination modes (which keys are lite) and four levels of brightness for each mode - almost everyone complains that all levels except for the minimal level are too bright.  I do have mine set for the minimal level so I suppose I fall in to that camp.

Plus it has a small set, only eight, media keys available for a bit of control over things happening on your "desktop".  I am using Linux (as readers of this blog know) and was pleased to find that all of the media keys work right out of the box without any fussing around on my part in key definitions.  That's always nice.  I don't use many of them, but volume control is always useful.

I bought mine at Newegg for $119 which is quit a bit of moola for a keyboard (and that was on sale for ten bucks), but I suspect that with a little care and cleaning, this could be the last keyboard I will need for a long, long time.  I had my last keyboard for over ten years (a Logitech Access keyboard), and will take better care of this one since I happen to like it a bit more too.

I went back to Newegg to make the link to the keyboard (I suppose I could link to the Rosewill website too) and noticed, as for the last month, that the keyboard remains sold out.  I can understand why, when I went looking for a new keyboard (mostly prompted by seeing how useful my wife's Macbook Pro illuminated keyboard was for typing in darker rooms) it was the keyboard which best fit my requirements:

Black - all my other PC stuff seems to have migrated to black
Mechanical key switches - Cherry Brown being the preferred choice
Illuminated - LED was best and I don't need funky multiple colors
Media keys - I wanted a minimal set of media keys mostly to change volume

Of all the keyboards I looked at this one best fit the above list.  There are a couple of items from other keyboards which would be good such as the Linux key caps to replace the windows keys on the Das Keyboard, N key rollover on a PS/2 with hardware interrupt would be nice, but this keyboard needed USB to get power for the LEDs (and this unit has 6 key rollover which really is good enough).

So no photos but there are better photos available at the Newegg website and here at the Rosewill web site.