Yet another possible X-Keys alternative

[ragawaga]

Before I start, I'm sorry for making another post on this subject. I'd love to get an x-keys pro, but I don't think that I could ever justify the cost to my girlfriend...and a little to myself.

I've been looking into building my own, using their matrix, but after ages searching I just couldn't find anything helpful....so I started looking at potential cheaper alternatives and today have found 2 very promising keyboards :

http://www.ceratech.co.uk/cpages/epos/msr/kyb500-s60cps2bk.htm

http://www.ceratech.co.uk/cpages/epos/msr/kyb500-s51aps2bk.htm

I doubt anyone else has tried these out but would be keen to hear people's opinions on how they appear.

[Tehtsuo]

Very interesting indeed.

[ragawaga]

Exactly what I thought. It's not exactly the same layout...but seems to have all the features there down to the replaceable key covers. My major issue was that the x-keys seems to be quite hard to source in the UK...and they're very expensive as well. This is around half the price of the x-keys pro.

[Tehtsuo]

That number pad on the right... I wonder if it's really a numberpad, or just set up as one for display. It's advertised as a 60 key, but are all 60 keys programmable?

Buy one and tell us! :)

[ragawaga]

If you look at the enlarged pic or the pdf, it has those buttons with the replaceable key caps...so I'd assume that they're programmable as well....just have them there as default. Their intended purpose is for point of sale terminals.

[Tehtsuo]

Yeah, I saw that. It sounds very much like an xkeys knockoff. I remember seeing something about cherry keyboards on these forums way back, but I don't remember it looking quite like this. This looks much closer to an xkeys.

[Memn]

They look really good. They would cost me about the same as an XKey's Pro, but I like the layouts... I particularly like the one with the 3 different key sections...

[Herc130]

I don't think it's an X-keys knock off, no doubt compaines have been making programable keyboards for stores for a while now and I know of at least 3 different one's in the US and they have been around longer then PI ENg.. Everytime I am buying something at a store, I always check out the keyboards they use lol. Some of them would be great for MMO use..most...not so much. Only remember this one

http://www.fentek-ind.com/program.htm without searching too hard. X-keys only one I know of so far that target the products for personal use. This thing here looks like something the guy working behind the counter would use to ring me up for whatever I am buying. Not saying you can't use it for MMO's. If they got rid of the key-swipe (maybe they already have a model without it) and shrunk it down some, that would be great. Although I perfer USB and programs for how the keypad interfaces with the computer as that is far easier to set-up and copy over to multiple machines.

[ragawaga]

I agree about it not being an x-keys ripoff. In my searching...most of the solutions/alternatives seem to be POS keyboards. As Herc130 said, these have been around for ages....and some are very very dated. However in saying that, some of them would be great for MMO usage.

I already have a logitech G15 (the old one with the 18 G keys) and found that the G keys took my hand a bit further from WASD than what I was comfortable with. I've recently had some limited success my mapping WASD to G8, G10, G11 and G12...but this obviously uses up 4 of my 18 keys...not so great for multiboxing :( So I'm looking for one that I can still map my movemement keys to but still having a short distance to "travel" to find the rest of my hot keys. I'm also an altaholic and it would be nice to have something that I can switch around for different alts and I reckon this could be the solution.

Fortunately space on my desk isn't an issue as the desk I'm using is huge. It's an old dinner table that seats 8 people :)

As far as the card swipe thingy...meh....it's not going to affect how I use it, so don't care whether it's there or not....although might be nice if there's a version without it that's cheaper :thumbsup:

[elsegundo]

all that... AND a credit card reader... nice! =]