deskthority

Hello Deskthority,

I'm a relatively "long-time" lurker just now joining the forum. I stumbled upon the wiki as I was trying to find more information about the switches in my old Amiga 1200 keyboard... Even though these Mitsumis were not produced anymore I wanted to find a good keyboard with a similar feel. I eventually purchased a Filco Majestouch 2 with MX Brown switches; before that I had decided to learn touch-typing after 30 years of hunting and pecking and I figured the light tactile point of the browns would somehow help me type better than say purely linear mx reds.

I have to confess that the first few days with these mx browns were slightly disappointing as they really felt super light compared to the scissor switches on my macbook (on which I was practicing my touch-typing) and led to all sorts of typing mistakes (and curses). I took the board to work to use it as my daily driver and *forced* myself to use it exclusively. Two months later I could not use anything else I was finally happy with my purchase.

It all started again four weeks ago. I was thinking of these incredible NCD X-terminals we had at university. They came with these awesome clicky keyboards that made you want to type more C and Unix stuff. After a couple of sleepless nights it became clear that what I really needed was, in fact, a Filco Majestouch Ninja w/ MX Blue switches. To play it safe I purchased a switch try-bag from WASD first. The sample mx blue switch felt really nice, light and smooth with a substantially better tactility than my mx browns. And that mighty click reminded me of that NCD keyboard I was typing on many moons ago (I've never been able to confirm the switch type in the NCD though). Anyway I eventually ordered the Filco Ninja w/ Blues.

I received it two days ago and really I don't know what to think of it. The build quality is top-notch like my first Filco but the keys feel really stiff. The mx blue switch from the WASD try bag feels much lighter in comparison. In fact the WASD blue is as light as the brown switches in my other Filco once it's pressed past the actuation point. The blues on my new Filco feel 'scratchy' past the actuation point. It's hard to explain but the difference in feel is really noticeable and so is the fatigue in my fingers after 10 hours of non-stop coding at work.

So what do you keyboard veterans think? Is this stiffness compared to the browns normal after all? Was it the WASD switch that was abnormally light? Should I try to open the Filco and lube the switches, thus voiding its warranty only after two days of use? Or maybe I'm just expecting too much from these awesome mechanicals after countless nights of reading about them and watching keyboard pr0n on youtube?

Thanks in advance!

They are slightly heavier, but not much. I prefer blues myself. Browns are much less tactile.
http://www.corporate.qpad.se/modules/ne ... toryid=254

You'd hate a buckling spring board at about 80g of force. Most rubber domes are 60g +

hardwired wrote:I had decided to learn touch-typing after 30 years of hunting and pecking

Ha, that's my story, a couple of years back. Now I only type otaku because labels confuse me (because I usually have the keyboard mapped to something different).

I like the buckling spring. If you can cope with the activation force, it's the smoothest switch. All vertical leaf switch designs like Alps and Cherry will be less smooth due to the inherent nature of the design (moving parts touching each other). Especially the Cherry blues. If you can't cope, I advise the Datahand.

In any case, you'll find many different opinions here. And you are lost. Because now your only cure is to find your personal holy grail. Which will involve buying lots of keyboards, and spending way too much money. Just remember, you aren't truly lost until you start to obsess about the plastic bits on top of the switches.

Webwit is right, take heed. You never know until you try. Personally BS is my favorite switch that I've tried so far.

...and same here. I just learned to type (properly) a couple of years ago after ~30 years of quite fast H&P.

The Keyboard Oracle has decided: Lubed Cherry Ergo Clears.

The buckling spring brigade arrives in force! Another vote for IBM being the classic switch*, and way overlooked by new arrivals. One word: Unicomp. Yes, they're still made today. Just try not to get hooked in by the lure of an SSK.

There's a lot more mechanical switches for keyboards out there than Cherry's. The MX line is a good family of different characters to choose from. But the greats lie elsewhere.

Another switch to read up about: Topre. Arguably the best keyboards in current production in the world. At a price to match.

*And as you're coming from a legacy on mechanical boards, don't forget about trying old hardware. A lot of the originals can be adapted to USB now. I use an IBM Model F, via a simple programmable adapter, no screwdriver necessary! And just lately I got my first hands on with a beam spring keyboard. Yikes! They knew what they were doing back then. Before the bean counters ruined it for everyone.

Muirium wrote:I use an IBM Model F, via a simple programmable adapter, no screwdriver necessary!

No screwdriver necessary, only a soldering iron! Do you work in PR?

But I agree it's doable without lots of experience.

On the other hand, to recommend buckling spring to someone who gets fatigue from MX Blues -- you all mean that as therapeutic strength training, right?

hardwired wrote:I stumbled upon the wiki as I was trying to find more information about the switches in my old Amiga 1200 keyboard... Even though these Mitsumis were not produced anymore I wanted to find a good keyboard with a similar feel.

If you want to go authentic, you could pick up an old keyboard that Mitsumi made for the PC. These have buckling rubber sleeves, though, but you could easily replace those with springs from an Amiga 500/600/1200 keyboard as they are just under the keycaps. Could be hard to find the right type, though - Mitsumi has made rubber dome keyboards also. The correct type is white with a wave-shape in the front and two ridges behind the function keys (pen shelf )
(here is a picture of a Mitsumi keyboard with keycaps from a C128 ...)
There is also a circuit board available that replaces the A1200 board to use the Amiga as a PC keyboard.

Just ignore the people who suggest Cherry MX Clear, Buckling Springs (or Topre). They feel nothing like the switches in the Amiga 1200. "Lubed Ergo Clear" is a mod, that you can't buy. Cherry MX Clear sitches are more tactile than browns -- and without (the correct type of) lube, they are also the scratchiest of all Cherry MX.

hardwired wrote:The mx blue switch from the WASD try bag feels much lighter in comparison.

Switches can feel very different between two fingers to what they feel on a keyboard.

I have also noticed that some modern keyboards with MX Blue feel scratchy. I have vintage keyboards with blues that feel much better.
Opening up the switches on the Filco is very time-consuming, and you risk damaging the keyboard. You will have to de-solder the switches to get them out of the plate. If you tug too hard or use too high heat on the soldering iron, you risk damaging a solder pad.
There are people who have experimented with lubing using a syringe and thin needle, but I don't know if anybody has achieved any good results doing that.

All this chat and this goes overlooked:

hardwired wrote:I received it two days ago and really I don't know what to think of it.

Really getting to know a keyboard takes some time. Like you said, your Filco with browns took some time to get used to, so is it with this MX blues keyboard.

Please try to use it for a couple of weeks. There are downsides to any switch (even the high and mighty Topre), but you can only know if you can live with those if you really get to know the switch.

The Keyboard Oracle wrote:[…]

Welcome back!

JBert wrote:Please try to use it for a couple of weeks. There are downsides to any switch (even the high and mighty Topre), but you can only know if you can live with those if you really get to know the switch.

JBert is absolutely right.

Give those blues the same welcoming ordeal as you gave your browns. Then you'll know where you're headed. It might even be to a pleasurable realisation that they're just perfect… on the third week.

Buckling spring and Topre fanboys like me (I'm both actually: they're that different) will advocate our favourites, enthusiastically, every time we get the chance. But we weren't answering your question.

Give it time.

I do wonder … my ~three year old Filco with MX blue switches is perfectly smooth and was from new. It's definitely stiffer than MX brown, but not hugely so. My problem was more the sharpness of the tactile point, which is smoother in buckling spring and very rounded with Topre, giving it that domey feel.

I've seen a few topics in recent months that suggest poor manufacturing standards at Cherry recently, which is worrying, which together with the scratchiness makes me wonder if they've changed to a cheaper plastic that's interfering with friction (maybe that's what's jamming the clickers in blues and greens). Just idle speculation.

However, my contemporary (to the MX blue) MX brown keyboard has quite a few quite audibly scratchy switches (which I guess I've learnt to ignore), and many of the MX blue switches don't click right any more, though generally I don't notice. MX blue by design should be a lot smoother: clicky switches have less sliding action. Tactile Alps switches are far worse than tactile Cherry switches for scraping and friction.

Buckling spring, as webwit notes, is very smooth, simply because there are no sliding parts involved anywhere, apart from the keycap/slider itself.

Wow... Thank you all for your great insight! I wish I could have answered more quickly but I cut my index finger while slicing bread and did not want to stain my new Filco Ninja

webwit wrote:I like the buckling spring. If you can cope with the activation force, it's the smoothest switch. All vertical leaf switch designs like Alps and Cherry will be less smooth due to the inherent nature of the design (moving parts touching each other). Especially the Cherry blues.

Yes I've been thinking a lot about Buckling Springs lately as it may have been another contender for the switch technology found in the NCD X-Terminal keyboard I was pleasurely typing on 15 years ago. I originally though about getting a Unicomp but there are no resellers in Europe unfortunately (afaik) and EU customs can end up charging you a *lot* if your item is worth more than €150 w/ shipping. Quick eBay search shows that most second hand Model Ms are located in the US too.

I'll probably reconsider buying a used Model M after I spend a little more time with the blues though, as what bothers me with the blues right now is that perceived resistance of the stem against the plastic rail after the actuation point (AP), but not the force required to overcome the AP itself. Looking at how a BS actually works makes it clear that it just cannot scratch after the AP. I even expect these switches to be quite 'bouncy' after the AP which is what I like the most about my Filco w/ browns right now. And which is the feeling I'm getting from the sample mx blue switch I got in the WASD try bag...

The Keyboard Oracle wrote:The Keyboard Oracle has decided: Lubed Cherry Ergo Clears.

About clears/ergo clears: I read about that extensively when I received my first Filco w/ browns and found at that time that the brown switches were too light. I was lucky enough to receive a clear switch in the WASD try-bag, and I disliked it. I hope I won't be offending anyone but to me this clear felt too much like a rubber dome switch before actuation and felt super scratchy for the remaining of the travel. Again no offense but there's a cheap Logitech rubber dome at work that feels better than this switch. So I can understand why/how people got the idea of lubing its stem and/or changing its spring. That being said I used this sample switch to practice my first cherry mx switch opening surgery just in case I had to lube the blues. When I re-assembled it the feeling was again different. I think I may have slightly offset the position of the small metal leaf inside... I don't think I'll be messing with the blue switches of my new Ninja after all

Findecanor wrote:I have also noticed that some modern keyboards with MX Blue feel scratchy. I have vintage keyboards with blues that feel much better.

Something else that comes to mind that could explain the potential difference between the Filco's mx blues and the WASD sample switch. The sample switch has two metallic pins that protrude from the bottom of the switch case which is from what I understand a feature found in PCB-mounted switches. The Ninja ones are plate-mounted obviously. Two different manufacturing processes == two different feelings? I wish I had another mx-blue board to compare though. Because all of this could just be in my head at the end of the day ;p

Muirium wrote:Another switch to read up about: Topre. Arguably the best keyboards in current production in the world. At a price to match.

I'm doing everything I can to resist the urge to buy a 105UB right now. One thing that 'calms' me apart from the price tag is a discussion I had with my former boss a couple of years back. We were talking about the first Das Keyboard that had just been released and how pricey a good keyboard could be. In his experience the best keyboard he'd ever tried was a Keytronic. It's only recently that I realized that the variable switch weight technology was in fact nothing new and was even quite affordable in the 90's thanks to the KT ErgoForce. Too bad KTs are really difficult to find nowadays in the EU at least. But overall my point is that even if the feeling of typing on a KT surely does not quite match that of typing on a Topre, the weighting is supposedly the same, so it must not feel completely different or does it? Has someone ever tried both? Anyway Topre is too expensive for me atm but I'll try to convince my girlfriend to have one listed on our wedding's wish list ^^

webwit wrote:Ha, that's my story, a couple of years back. Now I only type otaku because labels confuse me (because I usually have the keyboard mapped to something different)..

Haha yes full Otaku is the way to go! I'm coming from an Azerty layout and decided to learn touch-typing in US Qwerty because I wanted to be able to "touch-code" without using the AltGr key.

Changing layouts and learning touch-typing at the same time can be a schizophrenic experience but really is worth it at the end of the day. It also helped me understand why I was making so many mistakes with my brown Filco and how to correct them thanks to this site: http://www.typing-lessons.org/preliminaries_2.html. Basically I was *not* used to hitting the keys "squarely in the center" when typing on my macbook or other rubber domes. It made a huge difference then. This plus reading about ergonomics, how you should not block the blood flow in your writst as you type, realizing that mechanicals are so 'elevated' compared to rubber domes that you cannot really use your desk's surface as a wrist rest anymore, etc.

To those who think that a light switch does not work for them: you're just hitting it wrong.

Findecanor wrote:If you want to go authentic, you could pick up an old keyboard that Mitsumi made for the PC. ...

Thanks for the cool idea! I'm going to start hunting for an old Mitsumi; this could really be fun. I have a C64, an Amiga 500 and an Amiga 1200 lying around. The keys of the A500 always felt super stiff. This was one of the early models that shipped with the Kickstart 1.2. Newer models with Kickstart 1.3 had a different keyboard feel and a creamier enclosure (whiter than beige )

hardwired wrote:Something else that comes to mind that could explain the potential difference between the Filco's mx blues and the WASD sample switch. The sample switch has two metallic pins that protrude from the bottom of the switch case which is from what I understand a feature found in PCB-mounted switches. The Ninja ones are plate-mounted obviously. Two different manufacturing processes == two different feelings?

No, the PCB-mounted switches have plastic pins on the bottom, one on either side of the plastic "knob" on the bottom.
There is no other difference between switches for plate mounting vs. PCB mounting.

There are two metal pins for the electric contact. A switch can also optionally contain either a jumper wire (a simple metal wire), a diode or a LED.
Jumper wires or diodes in switches add stability for PCB-mounted switches. Most modern keyboards with plate-mounted switches have double-sided circuit boards and tiny surface-mounted diodes, so they don't need any of those.

hardwired wrote:Thanks for the cool idea! I'm going to start hunting for an old Mitsumi

Which one? Mitsumi are known for two different switch families: miniature mechanical switches, and single-sheet membrane. (In reality they made a variety of designs, but those are the two common ones.)

Daniel Beardsmore wrote:

hardwired wrote:Thanks for the cool idea! I'm going to start hunting for an old Mitsumi

Which one? Mitsumi are known for two different switch families: miniature mechanical switches, and single-sheet membrane. (In reality they made a variety of designs, but those are the two common ones.)

Well I don't know for sure; but Findecanor suggested a Mitsumi with a 'pen shelf' and I think I just found one on eBay; ref is MITSUMI Premio Keyboard KPQ-E99ZC-13 Model KPQEA4ZA. It's got a big-ass enter key and looks like an Amiga board overall

Well, the conductive arc (AKA buckling rubber sleeve) variant is one of the most horrible switches I have ever had the displeasure of using. As an Apple keyboard, it roughly corresponded with the point where Apple decided that keyboards were pointless trash (cf MacBook Wheel.

"Mitsumi" is to switches what "Adobe" is to computer programs.

For buckling spring: try a nice new Unicomp, for sale in Britain at the Keyboard Company. There's a choice of colours and if you want to go trackpoint, they also carry the Endurapro. They ship to Germany and elsewhere, just remember to switch to the +VAT prices; a trick they inflict on us locals too!

As for Topre's feel, well, we talk about it a lot in these parts. Like buckling spring, there's no way to know it until you try it. I predict you'll pick one up eventually…

Daniel Beardsmore wrote:Well, the conductive arc (AKA buckling rubber sleeve) variant is one of the most horrible switches I have ever had the displeasure of using.

I have noticed that there are slight variations. The Mitsumi switches in my Amiga 500 has a mushy landing, but the switches in my Amiga 1200 are quite crisp.
I'm betting that the PC keyboard is one of the better ones, because it is newer, like the Amiga 1200.. The PC keyboards were quite common back in the mid/late '90s. I have not used one since then, but I don't remember disliking it.

Daniel Beardsmore wrote:"Mitsumi" is to switches what "Adobe" is to computer programs.

I work with 2d and 3d artists and had to at that

Muirium wrote:For buckling spring: try a nice new Unicomp, for sale in Britain at the Keyboard Company.

Ok so I really have to buy glasses next... I got my two Filcos from KeyboardCo already. Last time I checked if they had Unicomps I simply searched for 'unicomp' on their main page and found nothing but some spare Unicomp parts... Anyway thanks for the link and advice! I'll probably give the ultra classic a try if I sell my blue Filco.

Their site is just horrible! But I hear their service is good.

Unfortunately, as our only local Topre dealer, they don't even have a white model to choose from! It's all black legends on black caps there, or the beige one. Come on!

Findecanor wrote:

Daniel Beardsmore wrote:Well, the conductive arc (AKA buckling rubber sleeve) variant is one of the most horrible switches I have ever had the displeasure of using.

I have noticed that there are slight variations. The Mitsumi switches in my Amiga 500 has a mushy landing, but the switches in my Amiga 1200 are quite crisp.
I'm betting that the PC keyboard is one of the better ones, because it is newer, like the Amiga 1200.. The PC keyboards were quite common back in the mid/late '90s. I have not used one since then, but I don't remember disliking it.

Exactly the same with my two Amigas here. I'll post some pictures if I eventually get my hands on such a Mitsumi board.

Muirium wrote:Their site is just horrible! But I hear their service is good.

Well I find the design very friendly for some reason; feels like you're dealing with real keyboard enthusiasts and not just salespersons. The color, sorry, colour palette is also very British I dare say The two Filcos I got from them were securely and tightly packaged which is very professional imho. And you get a free beer mat too

Findecanor wrote:

Daniel Beardsmore wrote:Well, the conductive arc (AKA buckling rubber sleeve) variant is one of the most horrible switches I have ever had the displeasure of using.

I have noticed that there are slight variations. The Mitsumi switches in my Amiga 500 has a mushy landing, but the switches in my Amiga 1200 are quite crisp.

There's a nice research project for someone …

Commodore/Amiga keyboards ..
I have been researching those for a while, sadly I can only afford to read about them,
when something good does turn up it's always something like this :
http://www.dba.dk/commodore-pc10/id-1001831680/

Or 1200Dkr for a complete Amiga 2000 with the Cherry-board...
I just can't get myself to tell the Amiga-fans I only want the keyboard,
the rest is pretty much junk to me .

But so far, I've learned that Commodore/Amiga changed keyboard-supplier frequently,
some of the keyboards are awesome, others are mediocre and a few a horrible .

Depends which A1200 keyboard. There were 2 types. Older linear capacitive foam, same as in later A500 models. This were awful, and the only thing that feels similar to those and is still in production is Cherry G81 (MY Switch).
Later A1200 had normal rubber dome keyboards (although higher quality than most of the ones in production today), I think the most similar to those would be Topre (this will be slightly more refined) or Cherry MX Clear (slightly more mechanical feel).
To be honest, best Amiga keyboards were only available with A1000 (linear black Alps in America and MX Black in Europe) and early A2000 and A500 (awesome linear Space Invaders, definitely one of my favourite switches of all times, and MX Black in some of the earliest A2000s produced in Germany).

Linear black Alps…? Got a reference for this? Black Alps is tactile; linear would be green, bright (not deep) yellow or brown (colour shared with tactile).