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Buying Guide: Keyboard Happiness
Contents
- Keyboard Happiness
- Continued
I'm a bit of a keyboard bigot. Ever since my first IBM PC, I've been partial to the traditional "buckling spring" keyboard that delivers solid mechanical thwacks and clicks when you type. But IBM abandoned the business ten years ago, and my last keyboard finally succumbed to an encounter with a tall latte last week.
I could have replaced it with an Avant Stellar, one of the few mechanical keyboards still available. But I'm a cheap geek and couldn't justify spending more for my keyboard than for my CPU. Instead I did what many of you do when something fails—made a frantic dash to the mall for an emergency replacement. But can you really find keyboard happiness in a $15 package? I set off to find out, buying the cheapest ones I could find at an assortment of computer, office supply, and electronics stores.
Inexpensive keyboards are big sellers. At Best Buy, the rock-bottom $15 offering was sold out, with the next one pushing $30 (I passed). The $13 Nexxtech from Circuit City is a best seller, too. "I sell at least two a day," said the salesclerk, "and I've never had one returned."
I also picked up CompUSA's lowest-price model, a $20 ViewSonic that is hardly a bargain. At OfficeMax I found a $12 Belkin, and to compensate for Best Buy, a $15 Logitech. Why the Logitech? The company's more expensive models score well, and I wondered if the cheaper version would too.
I was put off by Target's lowest-price offering—a $40 wireless keyboard-and-mouse combo from the cheap-chic Michael Graves product line. Not cheap, but stylish, so I bought it anyway. I liked the radical orange serif font used to ink characters on the keys—until they were obscured by glare in my home office.
I connected each in turn to my DIY system, built around an ASUS SK8V motherboard and an AMD 64-bit CPU. And that's when I realized—even before typing a single word—that all keyboards are not created equal.
I prefer USB, but only the ViewSonic offers this feature; the others rely on the DIN connectors in vogue back when IBM still made keyboards. All but the Nexxtech include a snap-on wrist rest, which makes for more comfortable typing. Cable length varies widely, too. TheNexxtech and Belkin cords measure less than 4 feet, which barely wrapped around the back of my desk and required repositioning my PC so they would reach. The 5-foot cables on the Logitech and ViewSonic, by contrast, fit just fine.—Continue Reading