something that's become very clear to me over the last couple years is that we
don't get as many cool clear Electronics anymore it's become a bit of a trend
lately to kind of release stuff that's like special version maybe but they
don't do a full line like you used to be able to get like everything in a clear
cool plastic shell and you just can't do that anymore at least not with
everything but now we've got the Kibum Phantom DIY mechanical keyboard kit and
luckily this is not the kit this is a fully built keyboard because I don't
have time to sit here and build it for you guys let's open the box and take a
look at this fully assembled clear keyboard the Phantom 81 is a 75 82 Keys
hot swappable mechanical keyboard and they've also got the weight on here it's
1.43 kilos so the cool thing is that even though this is clear and I think
it's mostly plastic it's not light you're not gonna get like a cheap kind
of feeling uh light experience and oh my
God is it ever pretty okay
before I check this out I'll take the I'll take what else we got here we got
cable uh we've got a
switch and keycap puller comes with a
couple extra switches which is pretty cool they've got these are actually uh I
don't know if they're special for this keyboard particularly but they've got these clear switches it is Wireless
so part of the weight is actually going to be the batteries that are in this
thing it's got a 4 000 milliamp hour battery and you can use USBC yep right
there you can use a 5.0 Bluetooth and
you can use 2.4 gigahertz Wi-Fi it's not crazy heavy I've definitely held like
much heavier keyboards but for something that's Wireless I yeah this thing's got
some heft to it I like the knob pretty satisfying you can click yeah the
nice nice little click there along with our USBC here we've got a Windows and
Mac switch to change layouts and then we've also got a Bluetooth USB and 2.4
gigahertz switch to change it depending on what you want to do and obviously if
you set it to wireless it's going to turn on and look at all this RGB wow
I really like this thing my only complaint so far
is the stabilizers sound and feel a
little Hollow and rattly I think normally this comes as a kit so you can
improve that when you put it together yourself the rest of it actually sounds
and feels pretty good though we'll we'll touch more on that later currently
installed are there Crystal switches which are these nice clear switches that
match the keyboard perfectly we can't find anywhere listed as to what exactly
the material for the plate is we know that the case is acrylic and I haven't
opened this or put it together myself so I'm not 100 sure it kind of looks like
brass but this thing is pretty heavy on top of the battery weight you're also
just going to have a weight on the bottom here that says key boom on it as much as I'm not crazy about the kiboom
logo itself I like that this is actually embossed into the plate it's just a nice
touch it's not you know just like painted over or something and while I'm
looking at the bottom I gotta say I think the bottom is just as pretty as
the top is I love this ring of LEDs
around the PCB and then you've just got these individual lights as well I think
it lights the whole thing up really well and actually really
you get some pretty decent diffusion on
the bottom of the case and around it on your desk which you don't always see a
lot of the time my problem with RGB is that it's not diffused very nicely and
so it's like wow it's bright lights and everything but it doesn't look good you
can see all the individual LEDs and you kind of can hear too because it's not
frosted it's just clear acrylic but you know that's kind of the point here so
I'm a little okay with it when it comes to the switches though this actually does look really good it's south facing
RGB and it really does shine through the switches pretty nicely I am a really big
fan of this one thing I'm only just noticing now as well be probably because
of how like perfectly it's kind of machined in here and held in place is
the USB dongle they've got a really nice slot for it right here and it just kind
of sits there without oh well oh it's magnetized oh that's great you might
lose it still it's not in one of those ones that like it clicks into place or whatever but this magnet means that
you're probably not gonna lose it when you're just like moving it from one spot in your desk to somewhere else which is
actually a pretty nice touch well it looks pretty nice what I really want to
do those do typing test and check this thing out but not before we talk about
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69 off your first purchase or subscription nice where's the cable oh
here it does here's the cable it's a pretty nice white cable I didn't actually talk about it too much earlier
um it's sleeved this is pretty cool these cables have a ferrite bead inside
here to protect electrical interference I had no idea I've seen them before and
never thought about it but we looked it up and apparently that's what it's can
do sure eat soups oh gee
um so we're gonna toggle this we're gonna toggle this to USB is it working
oh okay so that is a really minor annoyance that I have with a few
keyboards that are both Wireless and wired um sometimes you have to wake them up
and I don't like that if I'm wired I kind of want my keyboard to just be
ready to go like if it's plugged in I should just have RGB going all the time
I should be able to type whatever I want and it should just be instantly on it shouldn't have to wake up uh minor gripe
and I've only seen it on a few wireless keyboards a lot of them do just work as
long as it's plugged in so to each their own something to note but let's type and
see how much I love or hate these switches
I just stare at the screen and type things
everyone this is everyone's favorite part everyone loves to watch these parts
okay I screwed up the end a lot because I started talking about things it's only
100 words per minute 96 but you know
aside from that space bar it is a pretty decent typing experience I actually like
it um there's something kind of sticky about these clear keycaps that I am not
sure exactly what's doing I felt it before I know that the angry meow
keyboards uh especially the amafa that I tried it's also got very similar uh
clear keycaps that kind of look and feel like this I don't know if it's the exact
same set or what but yeah just uh something to note I don't it's not bad
and it's not sticky in a gross way it's just they're not
like slippery at all like when I tried the ceramic keycaps there's like a bit
of a weird slip to them and that's just absolutely not here I really can't get
over how good the RGB looks especially on the like per switch RGB on this
keyboard I think it's just beautiful it's got 19 modes built in and you can
change those let's try changing a couple of them so we're gonna try a couple of
these modes you can install software and change stuff as well but there's a bunch
of hotkeys that are available thanks to this handy actually I will be honest
I like this manual I don't like when you get a single card with all the hotkeys
and stuff on it it's a really minor thing that it's like an open leaflet but
I actually really like it everything's big all the text is huge because they're
not trying to fit it on a single little card so it's actually really easy to
read just like all of this stuff uh and
like like all of this is just I know it's a little small on screen for you
guys probably but in person this is actually a really large font and it's
just easy to read I can quickly see everything that I'm looking for here so
we're gonna go function and backslash
oh
it's like pulsing around the side only so if you don't want the switch
illumination and you just want this oh
they are oh my God brilliant David brilliant that's why we keep you around
here genius this is actually really nice okay I'll
quickly cycle through all these I won't get too hung up on them but they're okay
so it's just like a rainbow like clockwise kind of thing uh this is like
an all-over rainbow it's like raining or something going
across and then I think that's pretty much it
oh and then just pulses probably through the different colors you can probably set it to like one static color I kind
of like this one too um yeah as you can see it's got like
a lot of different RGB modes and I think that you're probably gonna be able to
find something that you like uh within the 19 I think they say modes is this as
bright as it can go too let's follow the brightness this is really dumb uh FN
function and down is brightness up and then function up as brightness down
this yeah this is doing something else entirely this is like functioning down
is like changing modes or something oh no it is brightness and it's the guide
that is wrong because function up is
backlight brightness up yeah so this has got to be a typo I'm not crazy it
absolutely says brightness down function up
you probably can't see that whatever svensa David saw it
and then so backlight speed is also left and right so if there's a pattern going
you can upper lower the speed which is actually pretty sweet oh yeah look at it
go then we turn it way down then yeah it's
Lou oh that's great toggle the backlight color function and this cool oh okay so
on top of all the different like breathing modes and whatever you can just cycle through individual colors as
well which is oh man this thing's really good
there's a lot of keyboards that can do this a lot of keyboards have different RGB
modes and software that can change it however you want
um however I gotta say in this clear
case with this like beautiful PCB they
went with something really pretty this is not a super common PCB color and it
really matches everything that they've done with all of these accents
everywhere like the knob the plate um the little patch where you've got
your connectors and uh yeah even just the PCB is this really cool color and
I'm very sold by this thing one minor thing to note that I didn't even notice
Sven had to point it out actually is uh the brightness only seems to affect the
switch RGB and not the bottom LEDs so
take that as you will regardless you can probably just turn all your RGB off if
you don't like it so the question becomes do you want to buy one they're
not that bad actually this thing is fully hot swap let's take a switch out
just to prove that with their handy dandy switch and keycap pullers yeah I
hate getting these fresh keycap pullers because they're always like right tied
up against each other so the first time you gotta use them you really gotta get your fingernail in there to kind of help
them take a sweat take a take a cap out to take our sweatpower we take the
Swatch out one thing I kind of forgot to mention earlier is that on top of this just
being like pretty well constructed honestly they've actually got a pour on
layer in between the PCB and the plate as well so if you're a fan of a bunch of
Foams and stuff then you'll like that
I personally do because I think that you can take a cheap keyboard and make it
sound really good by just slapping in some silicone or some foam but that is
something to consider some people are purists and they don't want anything in there but I mean hey you can just
disassemble this thing and take it out or if it comes as a kit then you just
don't install it and you do whatever you want you could tape the bottom of this
but I personally would not tape mod this keyboard at all I think it looks way too
sick to do that and you're going to cover up a ton of LEDs so add that into
your consideration when deciding if you want to purchase this otherwise it looks
like a pretty normal like pretty easy to take apart you just have like a bunch of
screws around the edges pull the case apart pull the whole thing apart it's
not as expensive as you guys might think how much how much do you guys think this
keyboard costs 400 son
150 you're pretty close but you probably have the card open and you can see you
can see the price
Spence cheating I thought that this thing a little more expensive I
originally saw the Canadian price and it's like 212 Canadian it's only 159 USD
it's pretty good eh and especially for something that's Wireless uh is a very
nice acrylic feel to it the clear is a
super cool style choice if you're into that sort of thing I think a lot of
people are right now and it comes with a knob you know knobs are always great I
don't know I'm pretty sold especially because it's not only Bluetooth you do
get a dongle which I just I usually prefer and
I kind of want this thing so it comes in a couple different colors as well if you
don't like this perfectly clear look there is a clear yellow which actually
might look really good with all this like brass ish material whatever it
might be and a clear black so if you want something that's kind of just clear
but tinted um then you can go for either of those options I you know I gotta say
I think I kind of recommend it I think that if you're looking for something that's Wireless but doesn't feel small
and flimsy like a lot of smaller wireless keyboards do and you're not
tied to something being metal I'm personally totally fine with acrylic
cases I think that they often sound and look pretty good but you're looking for
something that's you know gonna stand out really well on your desk and just
look super pretty ah yeah I think I'm really into this thing oh there you have
it guys it's a kiboom phantom 81 I think it's pretty decent overall I don't think
it's a bad price I recommend it if you like this video check out the Lord of
the Rings drop control keyboards we checked out we've got some really cool
keycaps cooler than these ones