The Cherry Mx 6.0

The Cherry MX 6.0 is full-size backlit keyboard with media and function keys. The main selling point of this keyboard is the RealKey technology, which is supposed to reduce the latency of key presses to 01.00 ms. I will talk about this later.

What’s in the box?

I posted some unboxing photos of the keyboard earlier in the week to show off how nice the packaging was. What you get in the box is the keyboard and a wrist rest. Besides other packaging and a manual, you will not get anything else. An interesting thing about this keyboard is that it does not have a detachable cable. This is interesting as it appears to look like a detachable cable. I can almost assure you that it is not detachable, but even now after giving it some considerable force it still looks although it is detachable.
The packaging deserves its own section because of how nice it was. It’s a box within a box and then a keyboard in a sock. Everything is red and black which is in keeping with the colours on the keyboard. And although the packaging is trivial in most respects it adds to the whole package of the keyboard.

Unboxing Album

What does this keyboard have?

  • Backlighting
  • Backlighting controls
  • Media keys for play/pause, next and previous
  • Volume Controls
  • Detachable wrist rest
  • 6.5 foot cable
  • Fn lock
  • Win lock
  • Feet to tilt the keyboard

Build Quality

This keyboard is incredibly solid. This keyboard comes with an aluminium case with an almost half sanded finish. It is not as rough as some other aluminium cases and feels rather nice. Although this is nice, the shape of the actual case is a little odd. The sides for example are tapered outwards and not all on the same level. I would prefer if the whole case was the same as the front, a flat face that is at a slight angle. Another point to note is that it is not all aluminium case. The only aluminium part is the top part. If you turn the keyboard over, you will see the plastic. The aluminium only covers the top. I would have preferred a complete aluminium case which would have given this even more weight. As a full-size keyboard I do not see it as needing to be light so it can be easily carried.
The machining of the aluminium is fine and I cannot see any imperfections. One example of the quality is the Cherry logo on the front. As a Cherry keyboard, I think the overall quality is one of this keyboards strengths.
cherry logo on front The combination of the plate and the aluminium case make this a very good platform for reds. I do not feel any switch ping and I think this could be a very good red experience. Maybe Cherry knows how to get the best out of their own switches, as I think the typing experience on these switches is exquisite.

The model I have uses Cherry red switches that are no different from any other. They are mounted upside down in an aluminium plate that is painted black. The switches are only upside down to have the LED at the top. This gives it better coverage to fully illuminate the main legend. The backlighting is even and can go very bright, certainly enough to illuminate the whole keyboard.

Another important part of this keyboard is the wrist rest. It is detachable and locks to the front with a magnet. This is my least favourite part of the keyboard. Although I really like the design of the wrist rest, It does not work as well as I would have liked. What I don’t like is how much it is able to move. With normal usage you will notice it has a slight wobble and will move down slightly. If you press down on the wrist rest, you will hear the magnet disconnecting.
This keyboard also features a material that attracts more dust and dirt than piano black. If you get anything on the wrist rest it will stick and be very hard to get off. Anything like dust and glitter will be the bane of your existence if it gets anywhere near your wrist rest. Again I will mention how nice it looks although they seem to have compromised the usability for how it looks. It also features a nice aluminium Cherry logo at the bottom.
Where the wrist rest connects to the keyboard, I am noticing something black rubbing off onto the aluminium case. I think it is just plastic rubbing into the case. This can be seen on either side of the magnet slot. blackrub

On closer inspection, when the LED’s are active a faint buzzing can be heard when close to the keyboard.

The keyboard has feet on the back which give you the option to tilt the keyboard forward. Unusually the feet fold the opposite way to anything I have seen before. They fold outwards from the middle facing either side of the board.

Regarding the cable, it is wrapped similar to a pexon cable just not as colourful. This is nice and in keeping with the quality of the board. For the price I think this should be expected.

Keycaps

My disappointment is more surrounding the keycaps than anything else. They are fine not really any better. Reasonably thick, they are made to accommodate the illumination of the legends. This is where they fall short. After a couple of hours of typing on them, I think the feel degrades significantly. At the beginning they feel smooth but not like worn down ABS. After a while they feel sticky and unpleasant. I think in some way this is a similar situation to the novatouch. Very nice keyboard with nice ideas but shipped with not so great keycaps.

Firmware

This keyboard does feature an Fn layer although it is slightly unexciting it does give you a couple of extra keys to play with. What you are given are backlighting controls in two different increments, volume controls and media keys. You also have access to a winlock-key.

The backlighting can be changed in either 1% increments or 10% and you are also given a key to turn it off and on. The 1% increments are very subtle and quite hard to notice. I almost didn’t think it was doing anything the first time I was using it. Although trivial, the on and off switch has a nice effect where the light fades out. Anything lower than 100% and you will not see the bottom legend on each keycap fully illuminated. Due to the LED positioning this will always happen.
From the gfy’s you can see the backlighting is all red apart from win Fn and Num. Fn is only blue when locked. The win key is unlocked when blue. Backspace also goes blue when on but I do not see this a lot.

Decreasing and Increasing by 10%

Decreasing by 1%

Backlight Off and On

win-lock

Fn Lock

The volume keys worked out of the box on windows 8.1 and are standard XFAudio keys that can be configured in Linux based operating systems and osx. This goes the same for the other media keys play, prev and next.

One key that slightly confuses me is the win-lock. I was not aware of win being a problem but if it is this key has you covered. Be warned, that it does not only disable the windows key. It also disables the following:

  • Windows key
  • Alt + Tab
  • Ctrl + Alt + Del

This lead so some frustrating moments where I could not find out why I could not use alt tab. Changing the state of the win-lock changes the colour of the win led from red to blue.
Full NKRO over usb has been implemented and I have not encountered any problems with this or any ghosting.

The Fn lock is a great idea and is very useful for someone who rarely uses the function keys. Holding control and pressing Fn will turn it on permanently. This is saved to the keyboard, much like the win-lock state and backlighting states.

RealKey Technology

I found this very hard to come to a conclusion on. How I am judging whether it is useful or not is if I can feel its effects, and I can conclude that I cannot. Whether the analogue signal path is actually in effect is irrelevant if I cannot tell the difference. I was prepared to be amazed but I can say with some certainly that I do not care for this new technology. Or it is just not useful. I ensured that I gave this some serious use and played games and did a lot of typeracer and could not feel anything in effect.

Conclusion

I can’t help but say this is a nice keyboard. The aluminium case always helps and the main aspect of a keyboard is typing, on this keyboard it is excellent. The wrist rest is nice but down to personal preference. Aesthetics wise I think the keyboard looks much nicer without the rest. Backlighting is nice but not useful or adding much to the experience, again this can be down to personal preference. To me backlighting is a bit useless, and in this keyboard I am not sure what the point is. One application for backlighting is typing in the dark, but this is only useful to those who do not touch type and in any case why are you learning to touch type in the dark. For gamers they don’t need to look at their keyboard let alone in the dark. For these reasons I will just categorise the backlighting for aesthetic purposes and it does look nice combined with the keycaps, even though I don’t like how the keycaps feel. The real feature of RealKey technology is marketing as I am not finding any difference. But then again this is a good standard to set. If the response time can be this low then why not do it. I think this is almost a great keyboard, more switch choices are needed, but I don’t really see anybody needing the RealKey technology.


Typed on Cherry MX 6.0

KatzenKinder

Only a small update but as a fan I like KatzenKinder information. From the ama on the /r/katzenkinder subreddit, there might possible be a sale around the beginning of August.

GirlDC Surfaces

After the banning debacle on geekhack it seems like GirlDC is expanding their opportunities and is somewhat active on /r/MK I don’t like the homer vader design but the keycaps are incredibly clean. The stormtroopers are much more to my liking however they are pricey. The stormtroopers cost $39 on techkeys. t

KappaKapps

At the end of last month KappaKapps teased their ‘Stark’ keycaps (not official name) that are a new design for a new line of keycaps.
Then they moved on to their summer sale. This featured some very nice discounts on their keycaps. Undead Clackin’ caps were 50% off at the beginning. For those who want some caps now, the July sale is currently running, as is the summer sale 2. The summer sale 2 is the ‘Ocean Beach Pack’ which includes the ‘Ocean White’ and ‘Seafoam White’. The July sale as you might expect is 3 Undead Clackin’s in red white and blue.

Flehrad

sakura Another new maker with some promising designs. Currently they have 3 designs the Critical 20, Samboo and Sakura. My favourite is the Sakura and I can’t quite say why. These are some nice designs and they seem well made. But I would agree that there is a definite over-spruing in making these caps.

fudorekz12/adamski07

This is a new capmaker with a prototype design. I like the direction they are going and will be watching them for the future. The cap looks especially good when backlit. backlit

zorberema_

Another upcoming maker. They have a concept that looks awesome and could make a great keycap. Expect some prototypes in the coming weeks. ;) the kinght

kudos_and_godspeed

Finally meowcaps are back and shipping. They also look incredible. These really do look good. t

On their website you can find a link to their mailing list, so I suggest if you are interested in future keycaps look there.

HiddenPower

With the previous sale being a success and caps showing up everywhere new designs have been shown. Two named designs; Otto and Ninja. They look very inline with the rest of their character designs. ninja

HfCx Handmade Backlit Keycaps

I was drawn to these as they are another type of artisan keycaps that are made in an entirely different way. The making process seems really interesting but I do not have backlit keyboards to take advantage of these kind of caps.

XX7 Artisan Groupbuy

The XX7 GB is underway and is very close to the MOQ. XX7 along with KappaKapps, they are producing the best 3d caps available.

vanpops

vader A simple show of ability but interesting to see what they are able to produce. All the caps pictured seem to be of great quality even if it is not an original sculpt or original design.

Brocaps

Finally the cosmic sale is here. I believe it started on the 1st but it is only around for 22 ish hours so get there quick. As we knew before this is the last sale for the Reaper V1. But what we didn’t know is it would be the last sale of the Brobot V2 as well. I found this more interesting as it is a much more prolific design. If you don’t get a Brobot V2 then they will become much harder to get after this sale. This sale does however contain many colour options.

Celestial PinkAstralInterstellar PinkInterstellar PurpleInterstellar BlueInterstellar GreenNebulusStar ClusterAndromeda SkysCosmic DuskCelestial Blue
Brobot V2xxxxxxxxxxx
Reaper V1xxxxxx
Broninxxxxx
Bronadsxxx
Stumpxxxx

Hotkeysproject

New sale is live and features some very appealing colour choices. Both MX and Topre caps are available. However, it does not feature any of the new designs that were shown during the month.

Binge

Binge’s latest sale is interesting as he is limiting the keycaps to a specific colour palette. This is something I have not seen done before and I thought to be interesting. The colours chosen are also quite interesting and I would like to see how they turn out. oclour

Clack Watch

Many clack sales in the past month. I find it interesting that all of a sudden clacks appear on ebay and are going for large amounts. It just seems to be accepted that now they will be sold for these prices so more are coming forward and putting them up for sale. Some of these are being sold for charity.

Clack Price
Mint Skull Topre $210
Candy Corn Skull Topre $225.50
Blood Splat MX $487.67
Drunken Skull Topre $490
Mr Friday Skull Topre €550
Salute Skull MX $910
Red Skull Topre $197.50
Blue Skull Topre $192.50
Pink Skull Topre $154.50

Typed on Cherry MX 6.0

Community

Geekhack Outage

The first news should be the outage of geekhack. It is currently down and many resources are still unavailable. At first it was a DoS attack and not their hosting has bailed. This is the reason for the longer than expected outage. With this outage speculation around the funding of geekhack has come into question and it is possible donations might be needed to get everything running again. As a result of this, a t-shirt donation drive has been set up by fohat.
With the outage people have been left without information and communications that are all a part of geekhack. This could be a useful lesson to show people cannot rely on one service. It is a huge part of the community and the downtime is felt greatly.

Keyboards

ErgoDox Infinity

Delays have effected the ErgoDox infinity and it will not be shipping on the date originally intended.

Alex Peterkin:

I’ll work with Logistics and try to get an approximation for a new time line, but I can say for sure that this will not be shipping in 4 days as originally estimated. Thank you for being patient.

This seems to be the result of being generally behind in production and prototyping. A later update suggests they are getting closer to having high quality prototype. Although it has had a rocky start I am still interested to see how it turns out, even if it isn’t the product I was hoping for.

The missing chip has arrived at the PCB fab and we should be getting a prototype from facility A before the end of next week with another prototype coming from facility B shortly after.

Once we verify that these are working and up to the high standards of the community, we will start mass production. Sourcing all the components and assembly should be fairly quick and we should have these in our warehouse within a month of prototype approval.

As soon as the units the arrive at our warehouse the bulk order will get broken down and individual orders will be readied for shipment. All told this puts the new estimated ship date at mid-August.

Thank you all again for being so patient. This is a major undertaking and we want to assure a very high level of quality before shipping these out

Dedicated Osu Keyboard

Osu is a rhythm game and that is as much as I know. But this is a dedicated two key + plus a pause button keyboard, strictly for playing Osu. So if you are a hardcore Osu player this could be the perfect keyboard for you.

EASARS RGB Keyboard

easars This is another full RGB keyboard supporting 16 million colours. It is said to use switches that have “50 million life cycle” but no actual mention of cherry. It supports colour profiles and macros and possibly full programmability. The official page says “Customized programming setting can be controlled freely.” but I expect a customisable Fn layer. Again this is another example of a strange keycap font choice.

Ducky Blue One

This appears to just be a backlit full size keyboard. An alternative to those who do not care for RGB but like backlighting. I was unable to find any other product page than the mechanicalkeyboards.com listing.

Quickfire Xti

xti Yet another almost RGB backlit keyboard. This one however is a bit more appealing. It is full-size has a removable cable, 35 backlighting colours and macro support. All of this puts it on the level of the Ducky Shine 4. My favourite part of this keyboard is the font. The gamecuben font has been ditched, which has been a huge annoyance to many people in the past. Overall the design of this keyboard does not scream “gamer peripheral”. This makes it my favourite upcoming stock keyboard at the moment. Ducky has the next place with the Ducky Shine 5, with its double pcb.

TK78 Rev C. Prototypes Ordered

tk78 SentrentPC is creating a new keyboard design that I don’t think has been done before or is at least very uncommon. It is a 60% with a numpad. Although this might be considered strange, I think this design definitely fills a need. Many complaints with the 60% is the lack of numpad, navigation keys and arrow keys. But the arrow keys and navigation keys can be easily implemented on Fn layers but people still like a physical numpad. This is not a problem I find as I rarely use the numpad. However, I still appreciate this design. Most information is currently on geekhack so now unavailable.

Update With Additional Information

This is straight from SentrantPC so I don’t feel it needs editing.

We just ordered the PCB. It’s a daughterboard plus main board, with the daughterboard being for the 2 port USB hub. Plate will be sandblasted aluminum and case will be milled from aluminum and both anodized to gunmetal grey. The plate is cool as it supports many different layouts (linked to the layouts supported below). PCB also supports all those layouts. GB date is looking to be August 1st and limited to 30 units. A GB for the version with the numbed on the left side will be done I’m hoping around September with it limited to 20 units and also 20 units of the right version as well. You can buy it with Plate only, PCB only, plate/PCB, case only, kit, or assembles with or w/ out keycaps. base price for kit is looking to be around $260.

Supported Layouts

From this information it looks to be a very promising new 60ish% I hope everything goes well for this GB.

TextBlade Has Not Shipped

For those not initiated with the project, the TextBlade is quite an interesting portable keyboard. Although not quite mechanical like many keyboard enthusiasts are used to, the form factor makes it interesting. It is incredibly small and therefore portable. Although the switches are a new design they do look interesting and I would like to reserve judgement on the feel before I get one. Another benefit is the huge range of layouts that will be available. Layouts such as Colemak and Dvorak as well as language variants such as Korean, French, Italian, Spanish, Nordic and Danish.
This may seem like an ambitious project and the delays they are encountering seem concurrent with this. It is around 4 months passed ship date, but a recent forum update suggests that in two weeks on the 10th of July they will be getting a new prototype and if it is ok then some will be shipped. Although I am saying 10th of July, they said Friday and did not commit to a date.

Cherry MX 6.0 Available on Amazon UK

Now available on Amazon UK for £156.43. I have one and will be putting out a review at some point.

Keycaps

Leopold Dyesubs Available Through Widebasket

They became available shortly after last week’s post. But here are the links:

Granite GB Update

After the comical update a couple of weeks ago it seems that production is moving forward. At this stage the keycaps should either be with massdrop or shipped by massdrop.

We spoke with Signature Plastics earlier today and they’re wrapping up the final production steps as we speak. They are aiming to have the order shipped out to us from their facility within the next day or so.

Once the group’s order arrives our warehouse, we’ll break up the bulk shipment into individual orders and ship them off to you as soon as possible.

Our warehouse is prepared to get your package shipped out the moment it arrives. Thanks for your patience and expect an update from us on 7/6 or sooner.

Triumph Adler Update

This was always an ambitious GB because it was the first from GMK that was totally new. I believe the colours used are not offered by GMK but were created for this GB. GMK has run into a supply delay which in turn will delay the ship date.

We spoke with GMK earlier today and they informed us of an unexpected delay from one of their material suppliers. The last remaining shipment of the material needed for our production order to complete will arrive by end of next week. Unfortunately, this mean the order will only be ready for us to pick up from GMK’s German facility by July 21.

Our freight partner in Germany is on standby, and they will be ready to pick up the shipment from GMK within moment notice. Our warehouse staff have also all been informed of the urgent nature of everyone’s orders in this drop. Needless to say, we are all prepared to get these out to everyone as soon as the production is completed.

We understand this delay is undesirable and we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused. Knowing what we do, we think the keycap set is definitely worth the wait and up to the communities lofty expectations, but if you prefer not to wait and would like to cancel the order instead please submit a ticket via our Support page (https://www.massdrop.com/support), and we will take care of your request right away.

Thanks for your patience and expect an update from us by the end of the day Pacific Time on 7/22.


Typed on Cherry MX 6.0