Previously, I wrote about my Unicomp Ultra Classic keyboard and my experiences with it. As it happens, that keyboard no longer works; The issues I mention there ended up resulting in the keyboard failing outright; it would no longer connect to the system and my attempts to repair the keyboard resulted in it getting worse. I ended up replacing it with a new one (going for a Black case this time around). Unfortunately, that keyboard eventually started to see the same symptoms, and it appears that it is the result of the same design failure. I couldn’t really expect much else. It may be the case that other models than the Ultra Classic itself did not suffer from these design issues, however I couldn’t justifying buying a third keyboard from them given my experiences, and particularly given the lack of user-servicability to the keyboards, with rather consumer-hostile properties such as using melted plastic to hold together parts of the keyboard as well as double-sided tape.

This left me in a bit of a spot, though. Unicomp is, after all, the only way to get a buckling spring keyboard, and I had grown rather fond of the Typing experience afforded by such a keyboard. Alternative keyboards didn’t use Buckling Spring, with most of them instead opting for something like a Cherry MX switch.

After a bit of hemming and hawwing about the decision, I ended up deciding on a Corsair K70 keyboard with Cherry MX Brown keyswitches. I’m typing on it right now and it works well enough. I still prefer the typing experience of the buckling spring, but a keyboard that actually works reliably comes out on top regardless of any other differences, as far as I’m concerned. It’s also nice to have Media keys again, as that is one capability I actually missed going from my Microsoft Wired 500 to the Unicomp Keyboard.

The backlighting feature is interesting, and the backlight programmability is, well, actually it’s kind of funny, to be honest. Kind of a bit overboard arguably. I have it configured to change the Color when I press a key and fade back to the original colour, with different sections set to different colours, for no particular reason.

I have found the software slightly lacking, in particular, I find that when it is running for some time, it has a serious resource or memory leak that exhibits itself in the program being rather unusable. Restarting the program fixes this, but it’s still a rather odd issue given the program has to run in the background for the custom backlighting setup to work.

I haven’t taken it apart, of course, however it doesn’t appear that doing so is particularly difficult; unlike the Unicomp keyboard it would probably be possible to actually put it back together, that’s a plus, and not having to take it aparet to fix a design flaw related to lacking any strain relief is a nice bonus too.