Interesting Finds & Heads-Ups

I wish I’d seen that when I ordered the keyboard…not game enough to pay for the extra shipping, but it does sound like fun :nerd_face:

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The red area is the part where the axis is thickened

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Really nice looking JTK emerald set. Only on sale for a few days. These have already been made and will ship out in April.

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I dig it. The set seems like it took a little inspiration from GMK Taiga but with Cyrillic sublegends and the color of it’s mods (a little less saturated mind you).

NovelKeys is having a flash sale on Cherry Copper PBT Keycaps that ends in less than 3 hours.

Normally $99 for the set, on sale for $65 right now.

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New goodies at SwitchOddities including those funky Venus and Neptune switches from TTC:

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Those look nifty. I wonder why there is no big vendor for TTC in the US market.

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Feeling very interested in this one.

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bespoke.keys is having a half-off sale on their whole inventory today. Discount applies automatically at check-out.

Most of the good stuff is already sold-out, but they’ve got some EV-00 switches left - basically Nylon Marshmallows. They’re a ThicThock JWK linear with their 68g progressive spring inside. Dry from the factory. With the sale they’re ~33 cents each. Aside from that there’s maybe a brush and some tweezers. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Unlubed from the factory is always a plus to me

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Same here although pre-lubed switches are annoying at best.

Black Lotus linears back in stock at Divinikey today.

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I wonder what switches are inside. Best knob implementation I’ve seen for a keyboard yet :stuck_out_tongue:

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I found this on the Chompi product page:

Utilizes the widely popular MX Cherry switches for its Hot-Swap enabled, two octave keyboard (switches & keycaps are infinitely customizable)

Really interesting to see that they’re using hotswap sockets on something like this.

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I was about to say there’s a decent sale on Holy Panda X switches today, but then I remembered their normal price is almost as high as Zealios - so it’s more like the sale today approaches a reasonable normal price of ~54 cents each.


Edit - more of a significant sale:

Artifact Shield sets 75% off today; that’s $20 for a double-shot PBT set in Cherry profile. They aren’t as immaculate as DCX, but for that price I think they’re fantastic. I’d say what these remind me the most of are Mistel’s OEM sets, but in Cherry profile. If you want a cheap durable set that doesn’t suck, you could do a lot worse than these - just keep in mind they don’t have anything in the way of compatibility options - bog-standard layouts only.

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Yeah, I was on their site the other day and saw the Moondrop switches were in sale for $25, and Drop says they are normally $30. Both times I have picked them up, they were only $20 :thinking:

Good switches when lubed (and really on sale!). I have them soldered into my Parallel Snake as my alphas with a POM plate and it sounds VERY nice :drooling_face:

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That’s Drop for you. Kono likes to do this too. I tend to not buy from either place if possible.

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I have liked most of their DCX sets I’ve purchased from them. When you can get them on a BOGO sale or something, it’s a steal.
I am also a member of their Keyboard Club and it has more than paid for itself with the keycaps and switches I have picked up from them. From what I have heard, Drop is slowly getting better.

You aren’t the first person I have heard that has had bad experiences with Kono either. Their pricing and shipping costs can be higher than most. It’s probably what makes them have stuff in stock that other shops are sold out of…

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Honestly Drop’s keycaps are slowly getting better, but they’re over all tactics are still a far cry from where they started at. If you weren’t around when Drop first started I don’t expect to you to look at them like us old heads do. They used to be a site that whole point was to band a bunch of people’s money together to make a bulk order of whatever product. Allowing the end customer to quite frequently pay a good bit below retail. They took a percentage for themselves from the GBs, but I suspect it wasn’t profitable enough to keep that model which I do get.

However they did a total 180° on how they operated almost overnight once they decided they needed to be getting higher profits to survive. Then after that they had a lot of issues shipping the right stuff to the right people & some pretty bad QC issues on a few GBs. So while they are slowly getting better, they’re also a far cry from where they started. Kono on the other hand has always had crazy high prices on the enthusiast stuff they sell. So while I won’t really buy from them much at all, at least they started that way & stayed that way!

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work-is-slow extended ramble; mixed feelings about Drop and Kono

I’ve had some sus, frustrating experiences with Kono - though it always turned out alright in the end - after reaching out to them directly a few different ways including public-facing social media accounts. :stuck_out_tongue: I think it’s quite fair to lose one’s taste for shopping there after experiencing or hearing about something like that. Those Midnight switches really aren’t bad tho…

As for Drop I’ve seen them do that price shenanigannery a bunch of times - there’s a neat plastic artisan that looks like a Game Boy - they used to sell it for $35, now it’s $45 “on sale” for $40 or something like that.

On the other hand, a patient customer can make out pretty good - most of the caps I’ve bought from them (and that’s a lot) have been through BOGO sales and other similar promotions. While the DCX announcement was… a mess… I have to say I think DCX itself is fantastic. I struggle to imagine how I could be happier with it as a set of key tooling. :man_shrugging:

I also have to second what @Rob27shred said - the company has gone through a few distinct changes over time. Massdrop was essentially a group-buy facilitation entity that effectively lowered prices for customers, as well as bringing some products to fruition that may not have happened otherwise.

Compared to that, they’re full-on fat-cats these days - though I do also want to give them credit for improving customer service and policy over the past four-ish years, and significantly improving transparency over the past six months or so. They’re still a corporate outfit that’s going to do all they can to be as profitable as possible - but they have at least course-corrected from the totally out-of-touch state I’d say they were in a few years back, and have legitimately at least tried to genuinely improve their relationship with customers.

If I could get DCX (and MT3) somewhere else I probably would - but hey - at least they aren’t HK Gaming. Looks like the documentation has been flushed from imgur, but they approached Oblotzky to see if he wanted to partner on some keycap sets… and sent him images of Oblivion clones among others to show what they could do. He politely pointed out that it felt weird to him given he designed the set - and here’s where they really messed up - the HK rep took it as something of a threat, and let’s just say he responded in a remarkably unprofessional way. Haven’t fooled with them at all since reading that correspondence. I hold my nose at Drop 'cause I love my Tera Plastics caps - but they were never that bad.

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