Speaking of which, it arrived at my door here in Edinburgh just two days after Teraset shipped it from Helsinki. Not bad! Kayvee thought I wouldn’t get this before Christmas. I’m pleased to prove him wrong!
Introduction
It wasn’t all that long ago when I joined Deskthority in the bigger scheme of things. My first post here was to ask advice about a tenkeyless keyboard I planned to get. I’d heard of Ducky and Filco, and already knew I wanted MX blues. Indeed, I found the forum by watching reviews of the various keyboard models and Cherry switches on YouTube; where Mr. Interface’s videos caught my eye. He knows how to do a pretty solid video review without the nonsense, and so naturally I followed his link and wound up here. A few thousand posts later!
But here’s the thing: my keyboard quest took another direction. With a lucky find of an IBM PC/XT Model F, I got into buckling spring. Once I made Soarer’s Converter, the whole world of Model Ms and Model Fs opened up, and I’ve gotten quite into them. Meanwhile, through summer and autumn, I made my own 60% keyboard with Matt3o. One with clicky Cherry MX greens.
So when Kayvee told me I’d won the competition, I suddenly had the chance to explore the way I meant to go from the beginning. Only, now I have IBM’s finest to compare with!
Instead of MX blue, I chose MX red for this keyboard. The reason is my Shiny 60% is MX green, and I get my full share of click already! Linear switches have been calling me for a while, especially as this Honeywell is still lying around, unable to be used with a modern computer. In other words, I have a few tricks up my sleeve despite being new to old keyboards really!
So Very, Very Yellow
Here’s the box. Ducky knows how to make a handsome first impression. Note the duck logo, who seems a little more at ease with himself, bobbing on the water, than he used to.
- An elegant splash of duck.
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- Quack.
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Space Saver
TKL’s have always seemed natural to me. I’ve really no use for a number pad that can excuse it taking up all that space between my right hand and the mouse. Until now, the TKL in my life has been the granddaddy of them all: the IBM Space Saving Keyboard. Well, the Ducky turns up the dial in that respect:
- Pretty big for a Space Saver.
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- And taller than you'd think, too.
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- They don't make 'em out of straight out sheet metal like that any more.
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- Takes quite some beating in the old space saving department.
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Light and Tight
The day this arrived, I’d just been shipping out some Kishsavers to the other locals who squeezed into Tinnie’s group buy. Those things are crazy, mind bendingly dense: 3 kilos for a 60%! Compared to them, any keyboard is light: even my home made 60% feels airy, and it’s made of stainless steel!
The Ducky struck me as absurdly light. It’s a third of the insane Kishsaver’s weight in essentially the same size. But don’t confuse lightness with cheapness. If not quite as effectively used as a sledgehammer, the Shine 3 feels just as firm.
I have a simple little trick I like to try with hardware. It’s the flex test. Pick up something from two opposite corners and give it a twist. You’d be surprised how bendy many things can be. Laptops have only recently become firm enough not to creak! The Shine 3 feels good and tough when manhandled. I’d put it in the same league as a Topre Realforce in this respect. Easily as strong as you need a keyboard to be, unless you’re determined to drive nails or knock out intruders and so on. Just don’t drop a Kishsaver on top of it, or your foot for that matter.
Perhaps a Little Too Tight
Detachable cables are a big plus, in my view. The Ducky comes with a passable one, but as a paid up member of the Keyboard (Snob) Club, I like to use a hand braided cable instead, like this one from Paranoid:
- I am a snob and a gentlemen. I will not stick my braided cable in there!
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Also note the extendable feet: like many keyboards, the Shine 3 has rubber pads for slip prevention on its base — appreciated — but not its feet. This isn’t an issue for me at all as I use all my keyboards fully flat, but rubbery legs would be a nice touch, people! Doesn’t every review of every keyboard always seem to need to point this out?
The Caps
I’ve gotten very used to PBT with my IBMs. Dyesub PBT! This keyboard is my first with blanks, and it’s a different experience, that’s for sure. I know my way around, but I sometimes have to catch myself overthinking it! There’s a break in period with blanks, I think it’s safe to say. Strange, as I do so much of my typing at night this time of year and never really look at my keyboards while typing anyway. Psychology!
- These yellow blanks are fantastically thick, by the way.
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This is the first time I’ve typed extensively on a standard ISO keyboard for many years. I turned to ANSI long ago, and switched to Apple when my desktop PC was still running Windows 2000. The combination of ISO layout and cylindrical profile caps is quite a callback to then.
Although then I had to try my Round 4 Sphericals…
- Proof that Space Cadet colours go with everything! Albeit in a Fisher Price kind of way…
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The Reds
Naturally, I put on my prized SPH caps set so I could take pictures. But I also wanted to see what MX reds feel like with such heavy caps. The answer is: pretty good. Really, I’m quite impressed with reds. They don’t feel at all “soulless” like I’d feared they’d be without the clicks that I’ve become so used to with my greens and buckling springs. The keyboard still clacks just as good. I even tried some o-rings, and the effect is fine by me. The important thing is there’s still substance in those strokes. It feels a bit like the first half of the stroke on buckling spring. And I do like being free from Cherry’s tactile bump, which I find dissatisfying compared with IBM’s sharp click and Topre’s smooth curve.
Reds get dinged for being scratchy. I’m not much bothered by it in practice. Having typed a good few imaginary lines on a Honeywell Hall Effect keyboard, these switches are certainly less smooth, and louder as they go. The scratch is there, but it’s nothing bad enough to bother me. I could lube the stems, or I could stop making unfair comparisons with the butter smoothest linear switch of all time! I really don’t notice it. The only time the MX red scratch is obvious to me is when I slow right down and try my best not to bottom out. But these switches are so light I have to tense up and type very deliberately indeed to encounter this.
The only switch on the entire keyboard I’m thinking of modding is the one beneath the space bar, which is a bit too light for such a large key for my taste. More on that in a bit.
My actual experience on reds is very positive. They have most of what makes the clicky switches I’m already so used to so satisfying, while escaping some of the most important downsides. They’re quieter, sure, but their smoothness reminds me of really flying on buckling springs, while the caps selection is far better.
The Plate
Something else is red in this Shine 3.
- A rhapsody in red.
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The Stabs
This is also my first keyboard with Cherry stabilisers. I like their convenience a lot. Switching stabilised caps is just as easy as the little ones, just swap the caps straight over, no need for transferring inserts or lining up hooks with wires. They’re a good bit quieter than Costar stabs, too.
Here are some recordings I made of typing on a few of my keyboards. Same microphone. But can you hear the stabs? Listen for the spaces between words. Only the Ducky has Cherry stabs.
Ducky Shine 3 with MX reds and Cherry stabs. Shiny 60% with MX greens and no stabs! IBM Model M SSK with Costar-style stabs Kishsaver: 1983 vintage IBM Model F with Costar-style stabs Costar stabs are easier to find and use in home built keyboards, which is why my 60% will have them… once they arrive! The Cherry stabs in the Shine 3 are PCB mount — the plate has holes cut for them to rise through — which isn’t much good for my Shiny project as it has no PCB. Cherry stabs do exist in plate mount variety, but I’m told they take some searching for.
Whatever makes manufacturers use the other styles of stabilisers, I don’t know. Patents? The cost? As far as I’m concerned, Cherry makes the best ones available for a commercial product. Their sound and convenience is something I could get very used to!
The Shining
Notice how much I’ve written without even mentioning the backlight? The Shine 3’s marquee feature is its smart backlighting, which even includes its own marquee! Every single switch on the keyboard has its own individually controlled LED, which means the controller can do essentially anything with them. Behold!
- Yellow dot, yellow dot, another yellow dot…
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There are several modes, with all sorts of showy stuff that no doubt looks good on a display shelf. Especially because the lighting can be smoothly dimmed or brightened anywhere, to create ripples across the keyboard. The one mode I wanted to try was reactive lighting, where keys glow as you press them and then fade, leaving dancing pools of light as you type. Yet for the first few minutes I hadn’t a clue how to get it.
This is where the combination of a dense user’s manual and blank caps really gets confusing!
The default when you first get the keyboard out of the box is a simple uniform backlight. I’ve never used a Shine before so I looked in the manual to see how to switch to reactive mode. The crucial bit is the function key: you press combos like Fn+F10 to cycle modes, and Fn+Arrows to alter them. But which one is the Fn key when they're all blank? Turns out it’s the second mod from the right on the bottom row. Found it eventually!
The second layer of my confusion was when I cycled through all the modes but couldn’t find the one I was looking for. After checking the manual again, and verifying the order, I discovered that reactive mode’s own default is the opposite of what I expected: unpressed keys glow, while pressed keys dim. So when I was cycling through them, I was seeing a uniformly lit board instead of a dark one. You change this by using Fn+Arrow combos (vertical arrows control unpressed key brightness, horizontal arrows control the active keys) and your settings are remembered from then on, between computers, so long as you don’t cycle into another mode. Arg! Perhaps there’s a way to save them that I’ve not tried yet. Anyway, it’s dead quick to make alterations once you know which key is which.
More than Just the Yellow
Oh, there’s more going on with the backlight than just that. The space bar has a pair of dedicated RGB LEDs. These can synthesise most any colour. Fn+0 toggles a demo mode that colour cycles the pair. For maximum spectrum!
You can dial in any arbitrary colour you like for the space bar, or let it cycle through the lot. I’m not quite sure what to do with it myself.
Backlighting is a divisive feature in general. Most people love it. A glowing set of legends is a major win on the store shelf, I’m sure. I wanted a backlight too, back in my first post here. And now I’ve finally got one — probably the best available yet — so what do I make of it?
Well, I like lights too. Or certainly the idea of them. The trouble is that LEDs don’t put out the right shape of light to fully illuminate a key. MX switches mount them off centre. These backlit caps have dark bits too.
But even with an ideally centred LED, the light wouldn’t pick up every part of a cap. The little pool of brightness each LED makes is not wide enough. Instead, the legends must be compact. Compare this with the backlit caps and legends on my Mac. It’s no mechanical keyboard, but whatever way its backlighting works does manage a much more even job.
Rather nice picture by Tom Woodward.
Why are flatter keyboards easier to backlight? Beats me.
Double shots of any weight obscure the LEDs completely. Even this little guy:
Comrade Lenin does not approve of backlights.
So, if you’re short of backlight compatible caps, PBT is the way to go. And PBT caps I have aplenty thanks to Ducky Nordic. Trouble is, they’re all blanks, and so the backlight that is visible through them doesn’t really tell me much.
My beloved SPH are far too chunky for a backlight. But I quite like the way they look when they're on the Shine. The combo gives an otherworldly vibe, lit from below. Notice the light leak from the side of the case in this long exposure. It's barely perceptible in real life.
- Do not underestimate the light stopping prowess of tall double shots.
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Fortunately, backlit legends aren’t really that big a deal for me. I can type quite fine without them, and I even find the dancing background glow of the reactive mode behind my monolithic spherical caps to be a soothing mirror of the screen I’m writing on, these long northern winter’s nights.
Oh, and Kayvee packed in a little extra for me besides.
- It’s pronounced nu-cu-lur!
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Modding Potential, or the Lack of It
I mentioned that I find the MX red behind the space bar to be a little light. That is the heaviest of all caps, of course, and one you press with your thumbs. Besides, I’m just used to heavy space bars, especially my XT! The obvious mod is to either swap it for an MX black, or just its spring. The trouble with that is this is a good strong plate mounted keyboard, so I’d have to quite a bit of work to pull the switch. There’s no shortcut to just pop its little lid off. And the LED fits like a staple through the switch anyway, meaning both of them have to go to alter it. That’s the one actual downside of their presence. I’ll probably not bother. The red behind the spacebar isn’t that bad, I just need to give it time and see.
Less understandable is the fact that this keyboard doesn’t seem to support PS/2. The telltale absence of a USB to PS/2 adapter in the box tipped me off. Why should I care? I'm not even much of a gamer, so I don't "need" NKRO, and my computers have no PS/2 ports! But PS/2 is a way into Soarer’s Converter…
Soarer Rehab
I do all my typing through Teensies. Soarer’s Converter is what rescued my IBMs from history, and his Controller is what drives my Shiny 60% too. Because the same logic lives in all my keyboards, I’ve gotten quite into summoning its powers for layers and macros. Black magick I tell you! None of this exists on the Ducky, or any other mainstream keyboard of course. But try telling my fingers!
A Pn key for a program layer would be nice, like on the Ducky Mini. I prefer Soarer’s sorcery where you can use arbitrary combinations as triggers, rather than the beginner’s level witchcraft that is a single programmable layer; but it’s a start. Ducky even managed to have an Fn & Pn key pair on the Mini while sticking to the standard 1.25 unit mod layout, and could have done the same by sacrificing right Control on this model. Perhaps the fancy LED controller doesn’t have the spare capacity to also be a fancy programmable controller simultaneously. Or perhaps the poor guy left to write the manual told them it was impossible to describe! We’re talking about fancy power user features here and many a fine keyboard ships without any of them. Including every single one of my IBMs, I’ll admit.
Oddly, the Shine 3 reports itself to the host as simply "USB keyboard”. That's not especially descriptive! Other keyboards usually say their name, like a Realforce. This helps when you're like me and configure each input device individually. Seems a bit shy for such a proud chap.
PS/2 output on the Shine 3 would have been my way into hacking it. I could have plugged it into my external Soarer’s Converter or, after that worked, built one inside of it with a Teensy. But no PS/2 means no artful hacks.
- That's a vintage knob, I'll have you know. Selects between three different sized sockets.
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- The Teensy name is well deserved.
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Conclusion
Technology gets better all the time, right? That’s surely how it’s supposed to be. Just look at the screen you’re reading this on and remember your CRTs! Computers race ahead so long as Moore’s Law stands to take them, but keyboards are the one true exception to the rule that everything only gets better. For a while, they really went backwards instead.
The reason I use IBM keyboards as much, but not the original computers they came with, is not nostalgia. Well, not only nostalgia. I never did have computers with most of those guys attached, and the same can be said for these spherical caps that I’ve gotten into in a big way. No, the reason is because they are just as great today as they ever were. In fact even better, with added programmability. And the fact that Model Ms and the like still beat most modern keyboards is the oddity.
Ducky’s Shine 3 has a taste of the golden age of keyboards at its heart: the 30 year old Cherry MX switch. What Ducky’s done is wrap a reassuringly solid but compact case around them, one that certainly gets the job done in a thankfully small amount of space. They fully exploited Cherry’s LED mounts to the maximum extent possible: by making a complete matrix for controlling every one of them individually. And, all the better in my view, they stuck with Cherry for stabs. The overall result is a keyboard with a lot of the charm of the old days — including a good strong sense of presence, a great key action, and undoubtedly the best available choice of aftermarket caps — with a fresh layer of lighting glitz. Oh, and it’s yellow. It won’t ever let you forget that.
