Keyboards (a regular whinge revisited)

[denny]

I don't regard myself as being a particularly unusual person. Therefore, I'm always surprised when a product I want, especially one that I can clearly specify the (short) required feature-set of, isn't easily available. After all, if I want it, surely the market must be there for mass production of said toy/gimmick/thingymajig.

In this case, what I want is a computer keyboard. Two actually, one for at home and one for at work, to replace the two I currently have. There are only five requirements for this keyboard, three of them essential, the other two desirable. Here they are, in order of importance:

• NOT BLOODY SOFT TOUCH
• Ergonomic layout
• USB
• Cordless
• Black

I loathe soft-touch keyboards. A keyboard is meant to *clack* with every keypress. Ask anyone who ever used an IBM 3270 console :)

Ergonomic layout is nice, if you can touch-type. Well, I like it anyway. This is the type commonly referred to as 'natural' now, by the way, as the immense Microsoft products gravity field bends our language around itself.

USB is a basic requirement of any input device these days. My current keyboards, while meeting the first two criteria, are not even PS/2, but AT type connectors. This is Not Good. Also, they have a quirky habit of throwing in occasional line noise which manifests as random backticks (`) under Linux, which is quite irritating.

Cordless would be handy, just to keep things neat and tidy and also to allow me to control DVD playback from the sofa.

And it needs to be black because, well, um... I'm not a goth, okay! I just want my keyboard to match my new monitors ;)

Anyway, you can't buy them. Or if you can, sporadic searching by me and a few friends over the last few years has failed to find them. Is it really that unusual a set of requirements? Or has the free market completely failed to fill a profitable niche here?

The closest thing I can find is so far is the Logitech 'Comfort', which meets four of my five criteria, but NOT the all important and massively over-riding first criterion.

Updates:
Split M-type keyboard?? Apparently not actually for sale. *sulk*
Datadesk SmartBoard. Weird keyboard layout, but online reviews suggest it has a very nice key action... hrm.
Kinesis Maxim. Adjustable split keyboard of some repute (and high price).

Comments

[fellcat.livejournal.com]

I loathe soft-touch keyboards. A keyboard is meant to *clack* with every keypress. Ask anyone who ever used an IBM 3270 console :)

I like clacky. My college keyboard is clacky. I like quiet too, provided that the keys go down a decent distance. My keyboard at home is quiet. My Ataris have spongy keys, which is odd, but tolerable. What I hatehateHATE is those really flimsy cheap keyboards that you can get for under a tenner from Maplin. The keys all rattle whenever you press one, and they don't go down far enough.

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

Spongy keys is the thing that I really can't stand. I want my fingertips to know when I've pressed a key, not take a wild guess at whether I might have successfully hit it or not :)

I hadn't really thought about the issue of key travel, but I guess that would fit into the same complaint - if the key doesn't move much, you don't get a nice positive feedback feeling from it.

By the way, I have a boxed Atari ST sitting around my old house, no idea of its condition though... my ex-lodger left it there when he cut out owing me rent a few years ago. Is it likely to be worth anything?

[zotz]

Unicomp still do buckling-spring keyboards, but apart from being available in black they fail your other criteria. AT or PS/2, and standard layouts only.

[fellcat.livejournal.com]

As to the value of the ST, I don't know. I would find out a reasonable price and offer to relieve you of it except my mother would go loopy on me if I did.

Does it come with a hard disk? That is something I really could do with, in order to do something useful with the ST and the STe that I already have.

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

Dunno, I've never opened the box. I'll have a look next time I'm sorting stuff out in my old house, see what's in there.

[katishna.livejournal.com]

I've used the second one (smartboard) before, or at least the Micro$oft equivalent. Once you get used to it, it's *really* nice. I'm listening to the hubby use his MS one right now, and it's very clacky. The only thing I didn't like is that i'm sort of a cross-over typist so I had to break that habit quickly.

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

Hrm... in my experience, MS keyboards have always had painfully spongy key action.

No-one else makes a keyboard like that SmartBoard thing by the way - look at the key layout more carefully - they're all lined up vertically, not staggered like any other keyboard. I'm not sure whether it would be better or worse, once you got used to it...