Digital Trends

Logitech Illuminated Keyboard September 22nd, 2008 | by Nick Mokey

Aesthetics

Unlike the aforementioned Saitek Cyborg , Logitech’s Illuminated Keyboard manages to avoid the limited appeal of the gaudy gamer-chic look, and light up in a more refined way that everyone can appreciate. It’s a fashion keyboard that will probably manage to draw compliments from the occasional passersby, but won’t look completely out of place at the office, either. 

Although LEDs are usually an invitation for all sorts of garish red, green and blue lighting effects, Logitech’s designers kept it classy by backlighting the keys with white LEDs. In the dark, each key has a soft glow which lights up the print on it, and in daylight, you can’t even really tell the keys are anything but ordinary. Depending on what you’re looking for, this approach might actually be a little too low key – the gamer crowd might not think it’s radioactive-looking enough – but we found it perfect.

The print on the keys foregoes the more traditional print of most conventional keyboards and goes for slightly techier look with a squarish, digital-looking characters. It looks a bit like the font they might use in the console for a game like Quake 4. While unusual, it’s nothing over the top, and we liked how legible and uniform it looked.

Giving the keyboard a (literal) low profile, Logitech has reduced the keyboard’s thickness to just 9.3mm. While this makes it quite stunning to remove from the box and marvel over, the thickness doesn’t call quite as much attention to itself after you lay it down on a desk, and prop up the rear with its folding legs. As one final touch, the entire keyboard has been trimmed with a thin band of clear acrylic that runs around its edge almost like a frame.

Comfort

Given its complete lack of depth, the keys on the Illuminated Keyboard feel quite a bit different from most desktop keyboards. In fact, the shallow key presses make it feel more akin to a notebook keyboard. That may be the kiss-of-death for those who prefer the click-clack of tall desktop keyboard keys booming up and down with every stroke, but for typists who favor the quiet, soft feel of a laptop keyboard, it might actually come as a welcome change. We might even suggest that Logitech has taken cues from the ThinkPad’s consistently praised line keyboards and brought them to the desktop. The keys have an uncannily similar look and feel, and Logitech has done an admirable job duplicating the crisp key-press that makes the ThinkPad’s keyboard so well liked. 

To help give the almost perfectly flat keys some character, the first row of keys (including the space bar, ALT, CTRL and function keys) have been given a pronounced bulge, making them easier to identify by feel. Given how often these keys are used in normal typing or in conjunction with keyboard shortcuts, this turns out to be a profoundly helpful feature that we hope other keyboard manufacturers will pick up on and replicate in the future.

If we have one complaint in the comfort department, it would be the rather low angle this keyboard takes when sitting on a desk. It can either lie completely flat, or, with its rear legs propped up, gain half a sliver of a slope. Being accustomed to taller keyboards that build in more of a lean, we found this a little uncomfortable and wished Logitech had included some taller legs. If you’re a fan of DIY solutions, though, it won’t be hard to cook up a set of shims to bring the keyboard to the proper height.

Image Courtesy of Logitech