Great quality mechanical keyboard with solid features and build quality
This is a great keyboard for an introduction to mechanical keyboards. Keychron makes solid boards at a good price compared to most enthusiast options. Other brands seem to be catching up with price to performance, but they are mostly restricted to terrible group buys or limited edition runs that sell out fast at ridiculous prices. The fact that Keychron's are available consistently through major retailers makes them worth a look for that alone. I have tried other versions of their boards over time including the K and V series. Those are OK if you just want a cost effective option that is better than most standard boards, but to me, the Q series is where you really start to get a good high end keyboard experience. The feature set is great, the battery life is very good and the customization through software is easy to use. It's also a solid platform to experiment with mods and different switches and keycaps. I am pretty typical in my tastes in that I like the deeper, marbly (thocky) sound profile when typing. As purchased this keyboard isn't really there out of the box. It feels heavy (in a good way) and you can tell the quality is solid, but it's more hollow and metal sounding to me. It doesn't have a bad sound though with the updates they have added to it (no pinging on mine), so if you like higher pitched sound then it might be good out of the box. If not, Keychron sells a custom foam kit for this board on their site that lets you modify the sound further as well as getting different plates. You can do similar mods by hand for cheaper without buying those, but they are a great option if you don't want to make modding your keyboard a hobby. I like tactile switches and was pretty surprised by how much I like the Keychron Bananas mine came with. If you like a little feedback from your key presses they would be a great option in my opinion. I eventually discovered Gateron Baby Kangaroos that I like even better, but Bananas are definitely better than the browns for tactiles to me. I don't want to go on too much about modding, just want to say that you CAN mod this board a lot if you are getting into the hobby. If not, it's a great board all around if you don't care about sound. If you do, you might have to tweak it a little, so you might want to go in ready to do that. Also, the key profile is a Keychron custom profile that is shaped different and much taller than the Cherry profile most people are used to. You might love it, but I didn't care for it in the end. There are many decent Cherry MX profile keycaps here on Amazon for a decent price, so you might want to go into this purchase with that in mind as an added cost if you have never tried SA style keycaps before. If you hate them, that's NOT the board and they are easily replaceable with about an hours worth of work. The wireless works great and the wired even better for responsiveness. The battery really lasts, and for the games I play, I have no problems with the Bluetooth responsiveness. I do think it's a touch slow for competitive gaming, but wireless is very good for anything else. They keyboard starts up very quickly from sleep and it has a function macro that lets you see the battery life without any need for external software. Due to the potential need for modding (and so spending more money) and the fact that it doesn't have the 2.4Ghz wireless option that many competitors have, I wish I could give this 4.5 stars rather than 5. Still a great price for what you get, and I definitely recommend this board. It's not perfect, but it is very good. It was a real eye opener to what I was missing! Read more
