Partner Content by Logitech
Keyboards don't get enough respect. Like, okay, sure: Gaming mice have freakin' lasers in them, and no argument, that's pretty fancy. And yes, nailing headshots is pretty important. But fancy, sexy mice aside, the keyboard is the primary way you'll interact with your computer, and by extension, a lot of your games. A typical day will see you hit thousands of keys, which makes for thousands of opportunities to realize "hmm, my keyboard kind of sucks." That's when you start thinkin' about getting one that's actually good, like the recent Logitech G810.
You'd be in good company. Several years back a lot of folks started realizing that the dinky keyboards that came with their computers just weren't good enough. Cheap, rubber membrane key switches made pressing keys feel like pushing fingers into a wad of dough, resulting in more typos, slower response times, and just a bad overall feel.
Meanwhile, the circuit boards of these second-rate keyboards couldn't keep track of more than three to four simultaneous key presses. You'd try to strafe back-left and jump but oops: Your character remained locked to the ground. Not good.
The answer to these and other crappy keyboard problems (TM) was a move back to mechanical keyboards, so called because every key cap is backed with its own little mechanical switch. There are countless models, but any good mechanical keyboard will provide a much more reliable, responsive, and satisfying typing action than the $5 cheapie that came with your old Compaq (may it rest in peace).
Which brings this back to the Logitech G810, a new mechanical from Logitech that's getting lots of good notice. (It's formally called the G810 Orion Spectrum. Why? Probably because it sounded cool.) Logitech claims it's engineered this one from the ground up for spectacular gaming performance. Let's take a look.
The first thing any mechanical enthusiast wants to know about a new 'board is what kind of switches it has.
Most mechanicals sport some flavor of Cherry-MX switches or a similar clone, but Logitech got a little excited and invented a new type of switch, calling it Romer-G.
These switches are 25% shorter than typical Cherry-MXs, meaning they hit their actuation point that much sooner, resulting in faster input response.
They also have a good typing feel and moderate noise profile, probably most comparable to the much-admired Cherry MX Brown switches. Logitech claims Romer-Gs have been tested for up to 70 million keystrokes, which suggests some poor QA tester in the bowels of Logitech HQ is suffering from a helluva case of carpal tunnel (may they rest in peace).
The other major gaming performance factor is chording, which is the ability to recognize lotsa keys at once. The G810 claims it can read up to 26 presses simultaneously, along with modifier keys. If you need more than that you either play games far differently than the vast majority of other people or are some kind of multi-limbed tentacle beast, in which case you probably don't need to worry about this anyway.
So yeah, it's a performer.
The other major takeaway is that the G810 seems to have taken LED keyboard lighting to its logical extreme. First, Logitech designed the Romer-G switches to concentrate light up near the top of the keycap, away from the lower edges. As a result, key legends exhibit very even, uniform brightness, and there's just about no light bleeding between keys. All lit up, this thing is a looker.
Second, the Logitech Gaming Software gives you complete control of every key's color and brightness, so you can create your own beautiful washes of light or create custom lighting maps for specific games. Logitech's a few steps ahead on that front, supplying 300 or so ready-made profiles for popular games. Will having WASD (or ESDF, if that's how you roll) highlighted in orange help your Counter-Strike scores? No. Does it look pretty sweet? Yes, yes it does.
One last nicety: The G810 has handy media controls, the star of which is a spectacularly satisfying volume roller that may have you changing your Spotify volume far more than you actually need to. Seriously, it'll make you act like a cat.
Anyway, you can find the G810 goes for about $110, which isn't chump change. But quality costs more, and the G810 seems like an impressive effort, combining serious gaming chops with head-turning LED action and a classical, relatively compact layout. Once you see what a difference a good keyboard makes you'll wonder how you subsisted with that $5 membrane junker for so long.
Jane Larkin likes her keyboards like she likes her men: small, responsive, and festooned in colored lights.
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