Product review: WASD V2 Keyboard

A new blog on Planet GNOME often means an old necropost for us residents of the future to admire.

I, too, bought a custom keyboard from WASD. It is quite nice to be able to customize the printing using an SVG file. Yes, my keyboard has GNOME feet on the super keys, and a Dvorak layout, and, oh yes, Cantarell font. Yes, Cantarell was silly, and yes, it means bad kerning, but it is kind of cool to know I’m probably the only person on the planet to have a Cantarell keyboard.

It was nice for a little under one year. Then I noticed that the UV printing on some of the keys was beginning to wear off. WASD lets you purchase individual keycaps at a reasonable price, and I availed myself of that option for a couple keys that needed it, and then a couple more. But now some of the replacement keycaps need to be replaced, and I’ve owned the keyboard for just over a year and a half. It only makes sense to purchase a product this expensive if it’s going to last.

I discovered that MAX Keyboard offers custom keyboard printing using SVG files, and their keycaps are compatible with WASD. I guess it’s a clone of WASD’s service, because I’ve never heard of MAX before, but I don’t actually know which came first. Anyway, you can buy just the keycaps without the keyboard, for a reasonable price. But they apparently use a UV printing process, which is what WASD does, so I have no clue if MAX will hold up any better or not. I decided not to purchase it. (At least, not now. Who knows what silly things I might do in the future.) Instead, I purchased a blank PBT keycap set from them. It arrived yesterday, and it seems nice. It’s a slightly different shade of black than WASD’s keycaps, but that’s OK. Hopefully these will hold up better, and I won’t need to replace the entire keyboard. And hopefully I don’t find I need to look at the keys to find special characters or irregularly-used functions like PrintScreen and media keys. We’ll see.