Interesting Finds & Heads-Ups

Yup its the GB34 by Niuniu

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Incredible pricing. I’m tempted.

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Does PBT+ABS mean they are a blend or are the legends one material and the rest of the keycap another?

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It’s a blend. It does shine like ABS.

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DCS Intro Beige and also WoB extras in stock later today at Prototypist. Link should work in 3 hours from my post.

Bowl is the US Vendor. Non in stock yet, but you can preorder (which I never do, lol)

I was thinking Bowl was a scammer, but I’ve got him mixed up with Loobed Switches, who I believe he was helping pick up slack for.

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PBS Strawberry Milk has gone to group buy. I do mean to try PBS eventually, but I don’t think it will be this set, which I don’t think has translated over from Cherry all that well. Top Center legends make me think of cheap shine-through, and along with the font on the mods is all fine but feels quite similar to the Womier/XVX low-pro, which I like at $15-20 (and love at $7), but I don’t think of as premium even in the low-middle niche PBS is trying to occupy. Then, inverting the apostrophe and quotes isn’t quite wrong but kinda feels that way. Pipe/Backslash isn’t hitting my eye right either with its sublegend.
They’ll still type how PBS types of course, but design-wise I think this one is a miss.

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Those IRL photos look really good for this set though! Wow.

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That’s fair. Color and novelties seem to be on-point. :slight_smile:

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Am I missing something, or is $29 for a TKL base kit of MT3 Dusk a really good deal?

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Feels like they’re trying to clear out their inventory :cry:

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So the sublegends on this set were actually something we struggled with - but I’m honestly happy with how they turned out here. You might be associating the legends with other spherical sculpts, which happen to be similar, but if you look in detail, I think you’ll see that ours have had a lot of time and care put into them.

We looked at other spherical caps to figure out how they do sublegends, and didn’t really like any of the existing options.

SA Cadet sublegends are the same line weight and thickness as the main legends and are above the main legend:

SA Laser used Cherry-like alignment:


and I suppose we could have chosen to go that route, but to me, top left aligned legends feel wrong on spherical profiles.

In general though, we tried to pick legends that fit the spherical sculpt of PBS, and this is where we landed. For the | \ key we tried many different things, and this was the best we landed on. We’re not going to change that at this point for this set, but if you think there is a better way to do it and can show an example, perhaps we can implement it on a future set.

I guess without much “spherical with sublegends” prior art, we just had to go with what we thought worked well. Signature Plastics SA is the most premium spherical scuplt, imo, and I think we improved on how they’ve done sublegends in the past.

For the apostrophe/quotes - I’ll actually look into that. That might be something we want to revise - but I know a lot of intentional decisions were made for the legends already, so this is probably intentional as well.

That said - we have other PBS options restocked now (Blanks, BoB, BoW)

But if you think these legends in general look cheap, you might not like the legends on those sets either as they are mostly the same. A lot of GBs are coming for PBS, and they don’t always use the same legends, so there will be other opportunities!

MV Classic had top left aligned legends which I thought actually came out really nicely. And PBS Goblin Mode also had unique legends.

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So one of the unique things about PBS, at least according to Matt3o, is that while spherical, he played with the design in a way that makes them look more cylindrical than they are. I think the top-left looks better on PBS (at least in images… I suppose it’s academic until I get some in-hand) than it does on other spherical profiles. I think the choice of multiple sub-legends per key also tends to argue in favor of top-left for the main, and I’d wager it was part of the thinking on SA Laser, along with SP’s work for Filco.

Other than the quote/inverted commas key, which again is not incorrect, especially when one is typing in a word processor, I think the problem is simply that I personally think PBS will do better with a cylindrical design language and that top-center and a certain weight of monoline legends on mods have been colonized by the budget makers, the former specifically to make sure that north-facing shine-through works. The pipe/backslash challenge is arising directly out of the choice not to go top-left, but I agree it’s going to be a compromise regardless.

As far as an alternative, I’m not entirely sure. The set was designed for Cherry, and probably works best in cylindrical. The most common Spherical sublegends are probably the SP’s various ASCII alphas, and they tend to go with the sublegends above and the main legends bottom-center like SA Cadet, but I think the differing sizes make it work better. Others have already pointed out that the manufacturing looks to be on point, and I fully agree, but this particular set is not for me, and I think the Cherry version worked better. I have designed a couple of experimental one-off sets for personal use, so I’m sympathetic to the challenges, and overall I could absolutely NOT do better, but it just didn’t quite hit for me. Best of luck to you guys, of course.

Now I also feel bad for being mean, LOL, and I may have to buy some beige blanks. :rofl:

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Black blanks just restocked yesterday and I definitely hopped on those within a few minutes of stock hitting again.

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My plan is to put my money where my mouth is and laser some legends onto them, so I have been waiting for the right project. I do have my Black Alps Wyse clone that I’m considering adapting to MX, and unsculpted low-pro caps will be critical to making it usable, but I’ll probably start with the aforementioned XVX cheapos as proof of concept. I also need to linearize and lube the switches, cuz they are scratchy little guys right now.

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PBS Classic did the top-left (with Cherry style sub-legends) and it looks perfectly fine

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That’s the exact set I was thinking of!

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On that note, the KAP Vella keycap line looks promising! All colors I’d buy, and at an estimated $35 per set, this seems perfect for 60% enjoyers like me :')

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NK having a pretty big sale right now including some significant discounts on keycaps.

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Good enough reason as any to finally pull the trigger on GMK Any Key!

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Has anyone commented on if the MX hot swap sockets change the sound/feel of the EC switches?

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