So recently, my old Logitech G710+ starting weirding out on me – the WASD keys don’t light up, intermittently. It’s not a switch problem, it’s an LED problem. Other than that, the keyboard still works.

That’s the downside to backlit keyboards – once the lights don’t work, you kinda don’t want to use it anymore, EVEN IF the keyboard itself works FINE (as in, you press a key, the correct letter comes up).

So, I was contemplating whether to find a PS/2 -> USB adaptor so that I can use one of my very old (circa 1990) mechanical keyboards, or just go get a cheap keyboard for my backup gaming PC.

In the end I decided to go with Razer, and selected the Cynosa. RGB lighting aside, this keyboard comes with what is supposedly a new invention by Razer – mechanical-like clicky keys on a membrane (silent) layer. Like what keyboards used to use before the current crop of gaming keyboards became popular and everybody is using a Cherry MX <insert colour here> keyboard.

When I installed it, I loved the feel of it almost immediately. For one thing, it’s quieter than mechanical keyboards. For another, it’s a soft landing at the end of the keypress, not a click. Personally I prefer these to mechanical keyboards.

The unique thing (to me at least), was that unlike Logitech which I was used to, they keyboard AUTO-INSTALLED the Razer Synapse software without requiring me to go online to download it from Razer. It even installed Razer Central too, all hands-off from me.

Now, I understand that some people don’t like being forced to use the Razer suite of software, but I ask you this – if all you want is a normal standard keyboard that doesn’t need you to create an account on the manufacturer website to get support, why didn’t you just get a $10 China-brand keyboard? Why did you spend upwards of $80 (and more) for a Razer-branded GAMING keyboard?

Now that I’ve used the Razer keyboard (and Mamba Elite mouse) for a while, I kinda prefer the Razer software over the Logitech one. For one thing, the Chroma Studio is leaps and bounds better than the Logitech one. If you’re a Photoshop vet, you’ll be very familiar with how Chroma Studio works – it uses LAYERS. So you can layer effect upon effect on specific keys, group of keys, and reaction to keypresses or audio (music visualisation). So in theory you can create some pretty damn cool effects! Right off the bat I created a 6-layer scheme for the keyboard which responds to audio (music), has a reaction to keypresses but only specific keys, and do a ripple/wave thing when those keys are pressed. All the while, some other portions of the keyboard will never change colours, such as the LOGO and the F1 to F12 keys.

The only “downside” of Razer suite is that you don’t create game-specific “profiles”, or rather, the profiles you create can’t automatically take effect when a specific game EXE is run, like Logitech can. Razer depends on “APPs” for different games to create game-specific lighting, and you have to download them from their workshop, or hope the game supports it internally (like DOOM).

And which ever you do, you can’t customise the colours. You’re basically stuck with whatever scheme the creator used. This is the downside when compared to Logitech, where you are the one in control and can customise the colours.

The other downside of the Cynosa keyboard is that the RGB lighting is kinda like a “backlight”, so the area around a key will be the colour you select. Even tho you can do per-key specific colour lighting, it doesn’t work well on the Cynosa. The logitech keyboards however, work very well with per-key colouring. The reason being there’s no “bleed” of colours from one key to the next. So on the Logitech keyboards, you can specifically have WASD in red colour and they will be red. On the Razer keyboard that have this kind of backlighting, the red becomes diffused with the other colour surrounding WASD and the red becomes kinda pink or purple, depending on what the colours are around the WASD.

So, in summary – Logitech keyboards are great for per-key colouring. You can make each key stand out in a different colour. However if you do effects like wave, ripple, matrix etc, it’s not so nice on them. Razer keyboards like the Cynosa however, are great for zone/block based effects. Colour cycling, waves, ripples etc all look fantastic on the Razer.

ps: This whole blog entry was written entirely on the Razer Cynosa, and I love the soft membrane feel on hard keycaps!