Email from Tai-Hao

[elecplus]

I just received this email from Tai-Hao. Apparently they make many types of keycaps.

Founded in 1962, Taiwan Tai-Hao Ent. Co., Ltd. (URL: http://www.tai-hao.com) is a very professional keycap manufacturer. We are capable to make various kinds of decent ABS, PBT, POM doubleshot keycaps. In the winter of 2016, we are pleased to introduce our new product: Doubleshot PBT Two-tone Backlit Key Set.


Mechanical Gaming Keyboard is now a very popular computer peripheral. Almost every hardcore gamer have one or even more. For gamers, mechanical keyboard is not merely an input device but also a very important equipment to enjoy the gaming experience. Nowadays most of the gaming keyboards are designed with LED back light, to make the legend distinctive, to make the keyboard fancy and cool. However, the legend on those factory standard backlit keycaps always easily fades after some time of use. Powder coated keys with laser marking legend cannot last long time at all, especially when the user is a hardcore gamer.

To make your beloved gaming keyboard always look brand new and cool, we are pleased to provide you with an ideal solution: Tai-Hao 2016 New Backlit Doubleshot Key Set!

Delicate Doubleshot Legend
Compares with similar product you can find in the market, we are proud to say that we have the most delicate and beautiful legend. With 50 years of experience in doubleshot tooling and injection, we successfully worked out the most ideal doubleshot backlit keycaps for picky gamers who look for best quality.




Best Lighting Performance
The most important thing for shine-through keycaps is when the back light is on, how do the legend look. Can the entire legend shine smoothly and clearly? Will I see the light leaking from keytop? These are things that gamers consider most when they plan to buy a baklit keyboard, or a set of backlit keycap.
When you see our product, you will be totally amazed by the lighting performance. No matter the light is on or not, the legend is always very clearly recognizable. And when the light is on, every character is shined silkily without any dark portion, no any leak of light can be found.



Variety of Colors
Based on the two-tone color pattern, we are able to provide our PBT shine-through key set in various colors. Gamers can choose their varorite one to dress up their beloved mechanical keyboards perfectly. For more informaiton about new color patterns we are developing, please contact us for updates.

Doubleshot ABS Two-tone Backlit Key Set.



Rubberized Backlit Gaming Key Set






If you are interested in this new key set, please kindly send me an email at [email protected] and I will provide you with detailed product specification together with the quotation sheet. Any questions, please do feel free to let us know. We look forward to hearing from you and cooperating with you in near future!!

Thanks and regards,
Ivy Huang
Taiwan Tai-Hao Ent. Co., Ltd.
TEL: 886-2-27610959 Ext. 12
FAX: 886-2-27669568

To see the pictures, please see the attachment.

[y11971alex]

If you need anything translated into or from Chinese, I'd only be too happy to oblige.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

There is a huge scope for Asian language translation (Chinese, Japanese and Korean predominantly). More than anything I wanted to see translations of alps.tw's topics on KBtalKing (all in Chinese), but KBtalKing has disintegrated and been absorbed into its parent site cool3c, and while the topics are still there, the images no longer load (possibly to do with anti-hotlink settings in alps,tw's Photobucket accounts that only he can change). As I encounter references to these topics in the wiki I'm rescuing the images and copying alps.tw's images to the wiki, as we are allowed to use them here.

However, there are many Japanese and Korean sites the translate. I tried to contact two people at KBDMania (one Korean, one Chinese-speaking) and I never managed to get a response from either.

Also, Chinese speakers may do better at extracting details from the likes of Xiang Min, Himake/Hua-Jie, Ortek etc. (Taiwanese and Chinese businesses) — both by avoiding the language barrier and maybe also by writing in a more culturally-suitable tone. Ortek especially, as I still want to know who they bought their Alps clone switches from.

Tai-Hao however are good with English, so I've never needed a translator involved.

[XMIT]

I don't know how you got on Tai-Hao's list but that's great. It would be good to know what their minimum order quantities are, and if they can do Alps mounts or dye sublimation at all.

When you have a moment is there any chance you could put the images in the original post? (I don't have a moment to do this now.)

This is good wiki material, it shows pretty clearly that a lot of really popular keyboards these days are getting caps from Tai Hao.

[XMIT]

...if you do look closely at the images, it looks like they're managing closed curves on the O and Q and other characters in double shot PBT pretty well.

[elecplus]

I wanted to put them into the original post, but for some reason, I am unable to copy and paste the pics to my pics folder. I tried from the original email and from the Word file. I must be doing something wrong...

[Daniel Beardsmore]

I don't know why they contacted Elecplus — seems a bit odd, and besides, the community and Tai-Hao have been involved for several years. The first western group buy for double-shot keycaps was in 2013: [wiki]Tai-Hao 2013 keycap group buys[/wiki] but other communities may have been working with Tai-Hao before that.

What we lack with these doubleshot PBT keycaps from Tai-Hao and Vortex is detailed photos and testing. I was invited by Tai-Hao to test them, but I chose to decline (not least as I'd have wanted plain white-on-black). The backlit photos of Vortex keycaps are affected by light spread from overloading the camera's dynamic range and optics, and it causes the letters to look misshapen — it's hard to judge the manufacturing quality as a result of the grade of photos.

Both ranges seem to do OK with the legends, while even Topre fell foul of this and went with hideous stencil legends. Hard to say without better photos.

Also, since the legends are not PBT (some are POM I think) we have extra reason to need a longevity test to see how they hold up. Some people must have been using PBT doubleshot (backlit or not) for months now and could give an idea on their condition.

My only feeling about Tai-Hao is that their typography looks a little dated now: I'd like to see a more modern typeface while otherwise retaining their classic aesthetics. However, this would exceed what a group buy could afford to cover!

[elecplus]

I get emails from overseas vendors every day. Most of them I just ignore.