welcome to my unboxing and first look at the
g119s this is the first refresh we've seen for for a flagship keyboard from
Logitech since the original g19 which added a full color LCD to the already
awesome features of the g15 um unless you count the g710 plus
which is a mechanical gaming keyboard so the g19 is not mechanical but it does
have their game panel LCD technology as well as their new Advanced surface
materials so with their new G Series logitech's sort of tagline is science
wins and the idea is that by strategically applying better quality
materials and Advanced Materials to the products they can make them look better
over time and feel better to use so inside you find not a whole lot there's
a little uh quick start guide setup guide there's a wrist rest and an AC
adapter because it has a built-in monitor basically it has a built-in
screen on it you actually do need to power this keyboard from the wall in
addition to the USB power but the advantage to this is that the built-in
USB ports on the keyboard itself are not
passive so they don't rely on the power provided from your computer which means
they are powered ports and you can run more uh Power hungry devices off of them
such as things like uh I don't know USB speakers or whatever else where a lot of
the time with regular hubs built into keyboards you do not have that
functionality so on the bottom of the keyboard you've got what logitech's
calling their Cable Management so you can see here you're able to route your
you I don't know whether it's your probably your headphone cable or whatever else you want to run through
here either through this side through this Edge through this edge up here down
here wherever you want it to go in fact you can have things come out wherever
you want down here which is kind of nice because how many times have you guys
been sitting playing a game and you got your headset cable over top of your hand
and it's just I don't know it's just annoying right so there you go there's
my little rant about that you can adjust the angle of the keyboard just by
pulling up these feet here I wouldn't have minded seeing these uh with rubber
Tops on the ends of them however they feel pretty sturdy so I don't think even
in a fit of nerd rage they'd be at risk of breaking which is the only complaint
I had about the g15 Gen 1 was the uh the
breakable wrist rest but if logitech's whole thing is Advanced Materials I
don't think we're too worried about that anymore uh we've got rubber feet here so
you don't generally have to worry about the keyboard going anywhere so there you
go uh speaking of Advanced Materials this does feel different from what I'm
used to on a wrist rest so rather than being a plastic piece with a coating it
feels more like it's a more rugged piece of plastic so the idea is that it's
supposed to be hydrophobic which makes it sort of cool to the touch and so that
it's not going to get all greasy and disgusting looking and then the same
thing on the keyboard itself on the back or on the face plate is what they're
calling it that's supposed to be a fingerprint resistant coating so even
though it's glossy oh check that out I
don't know how close in you can get but even if I like try to leave a
fingerprint on it it actually works so
that would be my one complaint about the g710 plus is that the the glossy face
plate is not that fingerprint resistant whereas on this one I I really don't see
that being an issue that's very cool all right so moving on to the
features we've got here is our full color LCD display which being can be
controlled either through the software or through the menu and navigation
buttons here we've also got a game button which will disable your context
menu as well as your Windows key so that you don't have to worry about
accidentally pressing them all of these macro buttons can be recorded on the fly
so there's 12 of them with three different layers so that's up to 36
different macro functions and then again you can record them on the fly so that's
pretty fly sorry um the keyboard layout is very
standard long shifts long backspace long enter so nothing that I consider to be a
cardinal sin that would bother me the WD
keys are colorcoded in a different color and the backlighting of the keyboard
overall is customizable which is very cool so you can change the color to
whatever you want that's again done through the Logitech software over here on the right side we find the layout is
again very standard so you've got more gaming color coding for the arrow keys
themselves although I've very rarely seen folks game with these Keys speaking
of gaming Keys the keyboard has five key rollover meaning that no matter what
five Keys you press so if you take your
entire hand and kind of go like this they will all be registered correctly
without any glitchy behavior um number
pad is pretty normal it's a number pad you can like do accounting with it and
then over here we've got a volume wheel this is one of my favorite
implementations of volume control uh many less expensive keyboards will
implement it as sort of like a function key with like uh you know press press
press press press for volume control I love the wheel implementation cuz it's
very natural to use you've also got a mute button as well as play stop back
and forward and then your LED brightness can be controlled here now I think any
kind of video of the g19s is going to be
incomplete without actually taking the thing and plugging it into a computer so
I'd like to do that but beforehand I'm just going to let our camera operator
who goes by the thuggish name of b-roll um go look at it while I figure
out if there's anything that I actually missed already advance surface materials
game desktop mode 5 GE rollover dedicated media controls intelligent
cable management and a three-year warranty there I haven't covered that
yet we'll be back in a moment so here we are with the g119s set
up in its uh sort of natural environment which is of course right next to a g710
plus now I want you to get in nice and close to the g710 plus and check out
these greasy marks around the arrow keys here there's pretty much nothing you can
do about that on the g710 plus whereas can you see that at all y okay
whereas with the g119s no matter what I
do to it other than this spot right here this will this will still get dirty but
these spots right here due to the coating on it you can see that it
doesn't end up looking gross because of what they've done here so that I thought
that was really cool um and that was sort of their point with this keyboard
but there you go so okay so this button it turns out actually controls the LCD
here and then uh let's go ahead and okay
so the back lighting is it's a white backl on here right now but I've got the
Logitech gaming software going right here so I mean Logitech really does have
the most refined software to go with their peripherals so you can see with
the three Logitech things that I have built in um I can go okay well I want to
select which things I want so I can have a YouTube video player for the LCD here
I can have an LCD webcam Bureau that's kind of cool so you could like webcam
with your mom while you're actually gaming and you could just have her here
sort of tucked away uh application
button will either list the running Outlet so here let's try the application
button which is this guy right here oh okay so that controls the app
applets that are running on the LCD screen here itself so we can go ahead
and I don't know we'll go to the uh the video player so we'll go to top rated
how to be beautiful from PewDiePie oh no
that can only be a bad thing oh okay no flash player not installed cancel cancel
ah go back go back oh okay so this is just to browse the YouTube video
well either way we don't want to watch PewDiePie's uh video about how to be
beautiful uh so let's go ahead and check out the software so there's also
lighting controls that you can change so let's go ahead and kill the house lights
and I'll show you guys that we can change the LEDs to pretty much whatever
color we want um Diesel's hitting the
lights for me just using the software control panel here so we can go ahead
and go like that so all of a sudden we've got a blue/ green backlight we can
go like this and we end up with a very deep blue very customizable and you can
control the brightness as well so here's what it looks like full red here's the
brightness control so it has uh looks like wow a lot of different brightness
steps I've seen keyboards brag about 10 different steps of brightness but this
is pretty much uh linear control you can also quickly select you can have oh you
can have different backlight colors per profile so your profiles are up here so
you can see that it's already set up that way so switching between those is
changing the colors and then of course you can set up all the usual stuff that
you can do in Logitech software like uh setting up profiles per game and it
really is a very complete list that they have compared to what other guys are
doing as well as programming all the different keys and all the different
layers per key right here uh onboard
memory is controlled here so that's that's where you can save profiles
directly to the keyboard itself and I think that pretty much wraps it up thank
you for checking out this unboxing in first look don't forget to subscribe to
L's techtips for unboxings reviews and other computer
videos