page 4 - photography

Photography 

As always, a picture is worth a thousand words.  I'm not sure if it would be irony or fitting that I'm taking pictures of a keyboard, but here they are.

The feet are nice and sticky, and combined with the weight, it is unlikely that the RK-9000 would be sliding around your desk unless youve suffered some kind of lubricant spill.

However, the back riser feet dont have any no-slip material on them like you find on Filcos, and we found that we could nudge the left side around easily with the feet down.

The detachable cable is right side only.  A few manufacturers will inset the connector a little and add a channel for the cable so it can be left, middle, or right if you need it.  My work desk is unfortunately arranged so that a left side cable works best.

MX Blue switches and the red plate.  MX Blue are a clicky switch that encourage a strong typing style, just to hear the clickety clack.  The sound reminds me of an old typewriter.

The red plate is made of metal and counts for a good portion of the heft of the RK-9000.  Im glad this feature made it to version 2.  Its not as red as the pictures make it out to be, but it is still nice to see.

Cherry Corp not only makes MX switches, but they also make the stabilizers for the larger keys, like the space bar and shift keys.  Under each of the larger keys is a metal stabilizer bar to prevent twist in the key.

Since the RK-9000 is made by Costar, the same manufacturer of the Filco brand, it does not use the standard Cherry MX stabilizer sets, instead using its own.

The Costar stabilizers are just clips that hold the bar.  Here's the stabilizer on the RK-9000:

The MX stabilizer sets are very nice, but they dont give the same feel that the non-stabilized keys have, making them feel a little less crisp, a little like a roll of newspaper is under your key.

 In the case of the Leopold below, they also included some rubber stoppers on the metal plate in addition to the Cherry MX stabilizer set.  I tend to prefer the Costar stabilizers, they provide a more uniform keyfeel to the keyboard than the Cherry MX set.

The Cherry MX Stabilizer puts the metal bar under the plate and attaches to the key with extra plungers. There's nothing really wrong with them, they make it very easy to remove the keycaps without damage.

Taking off the case requires the breaking of the seal.  We do it here so you dont have to risk your warranty.

On the flip side, we see the bare back of the board.  The RK-9000 uses a single-layer board.  Some designs use double-layer PCB, though with keyboards, there really isnt too much need for that.

The overall quality is excellent.  The PCB is very clean, and the soldering is perfect.

Taking a look at the controller side of the board and LEDs.

We are surprised at what we find, this is revision three from June, 2011.  This is very fresh technology.  There have been some reports of keys not registering correctly, but we were not able to reproduce any of those problems with our RK-9000.  It also survived our poking and prodding, too.

I guess I should go into some depth about how you can mount a switch either on the PCB or mount them on a plate, like Rosewill does.  But, nah.  The plate adds a certain heft, a stability that you can only get with a large chunk of metal.  Personally, I would like to use the same logic as applied to power supplies, the heavier it is, the better.

Well, there we have it.  Next we find out what makes it click.