Everyone knows I only love two things in this world, displays and keyboards.
So when the DS Pixel Key Pro was being showcased all over the internet,
I just had to have it. And it's finally here.
Wow. So we've got this giant keypad that rests on top
because this is all capacitive touch. And so theoretically, once I turn this on,
I could type directly on the screen. Do I want to?
No, it's probably going to be a very bad experience. As for what this experience is going to be like,
I don't know. Cause this feels honestly worse than like
your regular membrane keyboard.
It actually feels really bad. I was not expecting it to be that bad.
But before we get to it, let's take a look at the rest of this thing. It's got two ports and a switch.
And those are for data and power. So if you want to charge this thing,
you have to leave it plugged into power. And if you want to actually use it with your computer,
you have to also leave it plugged into data or use the wireless mode.
And it's got these other weird little plates. They look like Christmas ornaments.
I think you can, there it goes. Yeah, they're just held on magnetically.
Oh, a little nice gold color. And then here,
we've got an HDMI port because yes,
you can absolutely use this not only as your keyboard,
but as a secondary display. Do I want to?
Probably not. Will I do it for you today? Absolutely. But now I got to turn it on because like,
I don't know, there's a switch. Does that work? Oh, okay, there's lights down here.
DS pixel key. Oh, and there's side RGB too.
Rattles around. There's something sliding ever so slightly.
I got so excited. I forgot about what else comes in the box. We've just got a pretty typical USB cable.
I would have loved anything with any kind of sleeving. Considering the price of this,
because it's expensive, we'll get to that later. And then we've got what, some extra screws or something.
Oh, a USB dongle. Right, because this guy is wireless.
It'll do either Bluetooth or 2.4 gigahertz. Also, this is a very minor complaint,
but when you order really expensive boutique boards,
they tend to come in a nicely designed box. And I understand that this is probably
a bit of a limited product run and everything, but I would love if this was just slightly more
than brown box with DS pixel key.com
and MW parts at Gmail at the back. As for this keypad thing, I'm really excited to try it out
because it seems terrible. By the way, if you don't like a split space bar,
good luck, because this uses a split space bar and I don't know how you're gonna ever switch that.
As bad as it might feel, I'm actually genuinely impressed that they've managed to come up with something like this.
It's pretty cool. Kind of a major complaint actually, I guess,
I'm pretty sure that screw rattling around was supposed to be right here.
Yeah, this one's clearly there. That one is clearly missing.
And then this guy has some give to it.
So I don't know if it's just not screwed down all the way or whatever, but this is how it showed up
and I'm a little disappointed that it's not better connected. But enough of that, let's hook it up to our laptop
and see what this typing experience is actually all about.
We've also got their Ergo version that isn't released yet. That one's still kick starting.
So I'll take a look at that bad boy in a second here.
All right, we've got two cables plugged into this bad boy.
It was a little dead, so we're charging it. I'm gonna turn it back on, plugged into our laptop as well.
Super cool novelty. Really don't like that they couldn't figure out
a single cable solution. So our computer detected it, no problem.
It's got this sick animation and like the keys are displayed here. Okay, okay, okay.
Win, okay, win, N-O-T-E.
What, they play these little animations as I type too?
Okay, this is incredible. I don't care how much I don't like this thing.
I love it now. Oh, space is a, okay, okay.
I actually really wish that this was just raised more
because I have a major hard time hitting the space bar
with my thumb and then probably any of the other like alt FN menu control, all those with my thumb
because there's a giant like quarter inch gap from here.
So it's gonna hit there and it makes it hard to hit space. But other than that, I think typing with your fingers
is actually totally viable. Quick, I'm not fast and I'm not accurate,
but like this is so cool. Brown, talk, this is, you know what?
I drew quick, that actually, that turned out okay. Okay, now I'll try the thing that I am terrified of.
So what this should do is essentially take your inputs
up top here and translate them through capacitive touch.
Oh, come on. Oh, so there's these little nubbins on the bottom here
and then you slot those into these holes. Oh, there we go.
All right, it's a little finicky to get the pad on top, but it works. The only other complaint I have is I actually, you know,
it's already hard enough to kind of type on this thing. I wish it had bumps on the home row indicators on F and J.
It's pretty standard on a lot of key cap sets or just like, I don't know, any other keyboard.
So I'd like to see it here because it's already a weird experience, but hey, it works.
Hit space, the animation plays. Okay, sick, let's do, okay.
Quick, brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
All right, that's it, that's my practice. It's time to go to monkey type and try to actually do a typing test on this thing.
Okay, this is going to be a nightmare and it's probably gonna be my absolute worst time ever.
Ready? Let's go both space against, I have to look type.
I can't do this by memory. These, oh, I already made a mistake.
All open.
Oh, that's one other problem. I'm starting to rest my fingers.
I'm already done, 22 words a minute, 83 seconds.
I went to rest my fingers as I was like in between words
and it actioned, but with this guy, no, no, no.
All right, now let's try it with whatever they're calling this, the key cap frame or whatever.
Hardly likes the sound. Okay, 84 words a minute, 91% actually, pretty bad,
but I bet you with a bit more practice I could actually get used to it. It sounds like when you're playing a video game
and some giant bug monster creature thing
starts like chittering or chattering to its friends.
I don't know, like,
it's that 1% battery by the way already. This thing just eats battery.
And it makes sense because it's like, it's a giant ass screen
at a pretty reasonable brightness too. It's not necessarily a good outdoor keyboard,
but it does hit 300 nits, which is very respectable.
We swapped cables because the other one was going through USB-A and I don't think it was charging it enough.
Now we're at still at 1%. I love the little monster guy
that appears when you touch keys, this is sick. And if you don't love these little animations
that they're doing, you can actually make your own and upload them as individual files
and then customize each individual key as well at, well, not key.
We looked it up and it's a little tedious. You're gonna have to rename basically every single file
and there's 74 or so of them. We also accidentally set it to Arabic
and we don't know how to change it back. So far, it's pretty in line with my expectations
with custom keyboard software. Not very good.
Just waiting on Reese to bring us our HDMI cable so that we can plug one cable into the laptop for data.
We're gonna plug one into our power so that we can still charge it, still at 1%,
really hoping this thing doesn't die on me. And then we're gonna plug another through HDMI
to try to output the screen onto here.
I have no idea how that's gonna go, but we'll find out. I love how after you don't type on it for a while too,
it takes away the black background and starts playing this animation. You can put whatever video you want.
And the screen itself is actually pretty decent. It's IPS and reasonably high PPI.
We've got a 3840 by 1100 across a 14-inch display.
HDMI going in. Oh, whoa, okay.
The aspect ratio is way off on the laptop, but yeah, as you can see,
if you really wanted to use this as an external 16 by nine display, you could.
I don't know why you'd want to.
Full screen, if I, does this, oh, it stretches it. That's awesome.
This is wild. Can I still type on it now? I don't think so. It feels like the whole keyboard aspect of it is gone now.
No dice. So unfortunately, if you really want to use it as both a keyboard and a display,
you can't do that at the same time, which seems obvious in hindsight.
Of course you can't do that. Now I got so excited about the rest of this thing
that I completely forgot to talk about like the case and the chassis.
It's heavy. It's a full aluminum build, pretty good diffuse RGB
on the sides. And then on this neat little pattern they've got on the front, cool little DS badge on the top.
Be cool if this was interchangeable, just like the Christmassy plates back here.
And then if you want to go out, I used at least three fingers.
One was not doing it, but then you swipe down and it goes away. So pretty cool.
You can leave your HDMI, can I?
Amazing. I don't care what it costs.
I love it. It's so dumb. One final note though,
this one is the eight kilohertz version. You can buy it in one kilohertz or eight kilohertz.
And we measured around 30 milliseconds of latency,
which is really bad. This thing is expensive.
It is $6.59 on sale. It used to be more like $1,000.
And it's a keyboard all right. I don't...
All right, well, that was super cool, but I got to take a look at the Ergo version
that's coming out soon, but not before word from our sponsor.
Now we've got the DS Pixel Pro. Their naming scheme isn't ideal,
because the other one can also be the DS Pixel Pro, but this is the Ergo version.
So I'm already a lot happier with this. When you're spending this much money,
you should get a little carry case with your keyboard. The cable looks also bad still,
but whatever, I'm a lot more lenient on the terrible cable
when it's got a really nice soft...
Actually, I got a really nice case. Felt comes with a little cloth.
That's always handy. And then it's in a little plastic bag with a buckle.
I like that buckle a lot. Ooh, I like the blue too.
This is nice.
Magnificent. They've upgraded their system here.
So this one isn't capacitive anymore. It's actually Hall Effect, and it's using magnets.
So these are all programmable switches that you can change the actuation force on and whatnot.
And this one's also eight kilohertz. And unlike the other one, we tested a pretty reasonable one millisecond
of latency with that. It's a pretty typical split Alice kind of layout.
We've again got our switch and two ports.
So I'm actually going to plug it into charge pretty soon here. And then on the back,
we've just got a couple raised feet.
I absolutely love the black and blue colorway design,
but I've noticed that there are some big gaps. So I don't know how good the tolerances are,
but if you look here, I don't know how much you can see that on camera,
but there's a gap in between there. And then up at the top as well.
It's a really minor complaint. Like you're never going to see that when you're kind of just staring at it like this.
This one also probably will cost a lot. There's currently not pricing up for it.
But if the other one's anything to go by, then yeah. And yet again,
I'm going to complain a little bit about the construction because it looks like all these screws.
I can't tell if they're loose or if the tolerances are bad or whatever.
So we're just going to, they're in. I'm really not making them go much deeper.
In that case, I'm going to once again complain about the tolerances
because the screws don't look flush with the rest of the board. Like I can feel them as I move my finger
over a bunch of them, which again, you're going to have this down
and it's not a big deal, but it's these small tensions to detail when you're spending over $500 on a keyboard
that you kind of expected to be a little bit,
more put together. DS pixel key.
That's one screen. Where's the second? Oh, there, DS pixel key.
I like how it's like, okay, turn the first one on.
Hold up. Okay, turn the second one on. Okay, now what's the next stage
in the rocket launch procedure? Hey, the keyboard turns on.
This is wild. So now we've got two screens
in a split Alice kind of layout. And it's got,
it's already got an animation playing. No speakers on this one,
which is a bit of a bummer, but whatever,
I think you can live without it. Oh, why are these animations coming up as they touch it?
I don't know what's happening. Okay, it's not capacitive. So I don't even know how that's working.
Maybe it's capacitive and Hall effect. I'm not sure. It shouldn't be.
Let's pop these bad boys on here. Wow, look at this.
It basically ruins the screen. I will say,
I hope you can touch type because it is almost impossible to read what the keys are
with the crystal clear plastic switches that they've got here.
The nice thing about these is that they actually do have little home row indicators.
So brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
Let's see if we can beat 84 words for a minute, 91% accuracy.
Okay, 106, 97% accuracy. This is definitely a more pleasing typing experience.
And I really actually wish that they basically had the original version
in a normal layout with this system
instead of the previous system
because it just didn't feel good. This one actually like feels fine.
Like this, you know, I'm not gonna say it feels amazing and it doesn't sound amazing
because all these switches are like, they're outside of everything. Like they're just sitting here, see?
It doesn't feel right to cover it up. Like it feels like this should be how it is.
And then you don't use these. You don't use these visual aids. So you know what?
Enough with the visual aids. And they say it's capacitive
and it obviously is like it's detecting me but I can't seem to type like this, unfortunately.
So we're not gonna do that second capacitive typing test.
It's customizable. They're using a branch of VIA and it's QMK compatible.
So you can kind of do whatever you want. I'm gonna take this to take the peel off.
I got to take all the switches out. It's also hot swappable actually.
That's something I could probably show you guys. Oh, you just pop that guy out.
And then obviously, you know, if you don't like the clear caps, like those are just key caps.
You just pop them off and pop them back on.
We took the peel off and it looks slightly better.
It's more clear but the switches are still getting in the way and it completely kind of ruins
the whole picture effect here. And as for the other keyboard,
there is no layer to take off. It's just this rubber or something
in between the two plastic layers that makes it look all foggy.
I want them both combined. I want this system on this keyboard
but at the same time, like I don't want this either because I want to see the screen.
It just, it feels like it's trying to do all these things
but it doesn't do any of them super well.
But at the same time, it's probably the coolest keyboard
I've ever used in my entire life. And I kind of want it just because, you know,
it's historical most. No matter which version of the DS Pixel you get,
I think it's sick. I don't necessarily think it's a good keyboard
but I think it's a super cool one. I don't know if you're willing to pay the price for it.
Even on sale, it's still very expensive
and the Alice doesn't even have a price yet. It's just up on Kickstarter.
I don't know how I feel about it and I can't recommend it
because I can't even give you a price for it. So it's such a tough call.
I think it's an incredible experience. And if you ever get the opportunity
to try either of these, 100% you should do it.
I can't tell you to buy it. I think they're so cool and I want to like, I want to get one for myself
but I can't even justify spending this much money on it. Well, there you have it folks.
Love it or hate it. This is the DS Pixel multiple versions.
This one is expensive but on sale, on sale.
This one is on Kickstarter but there's no price yet
so I can't exactly recommend either of them. I think they're super cool though.
And if you want to check out another super cool keyboard, check out the AM Neon 80.
That one had like 3000 holes milled into it
and then it used RGB to make a pseudo screen kind of.
Very cool. Not quite as cool as this guy though.