Yes, I love opening a keyboard and findind a beautiful PCB inside.
That's one reason I hate cherry. Their PCBs suck!
Cherry is such a mixed bag of quality, It's hard to even begin. Their keycaps, cable, unnecessary RF paranoia, controller, etc are all very good, and either top tier or close to it. However, the switch PCB, internal connector cables, case design, etc. are all extremely poor.
What do I mean? Well, just comparing the controller PCB to the switch matrix one: the controller is very dense, nice dual layer with plated through holes, beautiful ground planes, nice soldering.
The switch PCB is made of a cheaper material, on one side has a massive ground plane (that is properly grounded at least) and on the other is a bunch of thin traces, using odd trace routing, etc. They already have a two-layer PCB, it makes absolutely no sense why they couldn't have shelled out the extra few cents for plated through holes, maybe they decided to put it in the cable instead.
The PCB itself is also much thinner than the controller PCB, You'd think since it has to support the weight of the entire switch / keycap / hamfisted register monkey pounding on it that they'd at least go in for a "standard' thickness PCB, but that's not the case here! It wobbles all over the place unsteadliy and it's quite common to see examples with cracks running through the PCB, causing early failure. Your 50,000,000 actuations won't save you from this awful PCB.
At least their soldering is well done.
The internal cables are also terrible! Whatever it is they used to connect the two PCBs together is very stiff cable. It's meant to be plugged into a socket (which you do see on some boards: more on that later) but that's unnecessary, as you can't separate the two with the grounding wires which are soldered (with huge nasty globs, though they get a pass for that, as good grounding is always okay) On the boards where both sides of the cable are sodlered, the cable is usually too long, folded in half, and in at least two examples is so stiff it pushes the rear casing out making a nasty bulge.
The internal connenctor I mentioned? more often that not it's soldered on crooked. There's a standoff on one side that's present and another that's clipped. I have no idea why they did this but it's bad design, looks horrible, and absolutely not the level of quality I would expect from my $300 POS KB.
I have keyboards from the 1970's with better PCBs than cherry has.
Now I see the PCB you have pictured if from a G84 KB with ML switches. I have
a similar keyboard You can make your own decisions on it. It has its ups and downs, and is in many ways nicer (or more acceptable) than cherry's
large g80 keyboards but even from the reflection of my lamp on the PCB you can see the shoddy quality.
What's a good PCB then? I don't have pictures handy, but TG3 have always looked nice. access / tipro aren't usually bad. Check out what WYSE was able to do in the early 1980's. The reason for the traces everywhere is they needed a very "compact" switch matrix, and only had one-layer PCBs available. Cherry use a two-layer PCB and don't take advantage of it. It's somewhat inexcusable. Wyse also label the switches on the soldermask, which can be helpful.
Other good PCBs? Here's an NMB that even has an upper ground plane like the cherry. This is, however, better in pretty much every way (thicker, more dense, better coating / sodlermask, etc.)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/dork_vade ... 928081893/
The PCB on this Pinnacle video editing KB is also quite nice. I was very happy when I looked at it. Just about the only "issue' is the jumper wire (and even that is handled rather well, I would say). Given how much these things cost, You would expect good quality, so maybe it's not in the same "weight class".
https://www.flickr.com/photos/dork_vade ... 884809274/
Actually, looking through my collection, I don't think I have any PCBs that are worse than cherry. Even the PCB under my maxi-switch rubber dome is nicer. I will take another look to be sure. Maybe the CMstorm QFR is worse.
I will say again though: alt least their soldering is nice. They are also very easy to desolder.
. But i must say i do like me some hand laid out PCBs
