written in front
In the current home market, mechanical key keyboards have completely become the mainstream of the market. The switches mounted on them were almost the home of CHERRY 17 years ago. Unfortunately, Cherry can be regarded as a model of complacency. It is obviously a leader in the field of switches. Juechen, unfortunately, the follow-up was weak, and its market share was almost wiped out by domestic shaft manufacturers. In particular, the three major manufacturers, Kailh, GATERON, and TTC, have launched many interesting shafts. I have always planned to write an article about shafts, and I am currently working on it. Collecting. In the field of
keyboards, Black Canyon is also a brand that everyone is familiar with. It entered the market early and focused on low prices and exaggerated styling. It is a favorite brand in Internet cafes. However, with the changes in everyone's aesthetics and the brand's own positioning, Black Canyon has also begun to create some interesting series. This brand has a great advantage. After all, it is backed by Kaihua, a big mountain, and it is very good at cost control. This Y series is its latest mechanical keyboard with mainstream configuration.
Details Appreciation
â–¼ keyboard packaging uses a new design style, with black and white as the main color, various letters, symbols and other elements as embellishments, giving it a geek-like look and feel.
â–¼ accessories are relatively rich. In addition to the regular keyboard body, Type-C wire, dust cover, warranty card, card stickers, etc., it is also rarely equipped with a keyboard handrest, in addition to a key puller / puller. The spindles are all separate tools, not a two-in-one design, but overall they are quite conscientious.
▼ Black Canyon’s Y series has three models: Y2, Y3, and Y5, which correspond to three different key layouts of 82 keys, 87 keys, and 108 keys respectively. They also basically cover the different layouts and sizes of different users. need. The one I have is the Y5, which is a standard full-size keyboard.
â–¼ adopts a simple style. The entire keyboard is pure white and embellished with blue fonts, which gives the user a very good first visual impression. The official name is "Luo Bai", which is in line with the overall style.
â–¼ There are many ingenious details, such as the power digital display window on the lower right, which I have only seen on Daryou A98 before. I personally like this design very much. It can accurately grasp the current battery level. When connecting wirelessly, I can determine at a glance whether it is a disconnection caused by insufficient battery or a signal cause.
â–¼ The power switch is located on the left side of the keyboard. The mode switching is interestingly designed as a round button, located on the top left side of the keyboard.
â–¼ can connect three devices in Bluetooth mode and switch through shortcut keys. An LED light ring is also specially added on the outside of the button to prompt with corresponding colors when connecting to different devices/channels. The keycaps of the
â–¼Y series are SA keycaps specially customized by Black Canyon. The height is slightly shorter than the conventional SA keycaps, and the recessed area in the middle is deeper, which provides a better wrapping feeling for the fingertips when clicking. There are many shortcut symbols printed on the surface of the keycaps, which can bring a lot of convenience when using them.
â–¼ In terms of appearance alone, the keyboard is generally good and the workmanship is top-notch, but there are two points that I feel we must talk about.
First: Placing the power digital display window at the position of the direction keys still feels a bit overwhelming. When the power is off, the black window is too conspicuous on the pure white keyboard, and it feels like a missing foot. If you change the position or Designing a logo or something on the left to create a balance would be much better than the current situation.
Second: The keyboard is obviously simple, but there is too much information printed on the keycaps, which makes it look a bit too cluttered. In fact, it can be seen that Black Canyon also paid attention to this when designing. The redundant information is used in small fonts with thin lines. Unfortunately, the pure white keyboard can still be noticed at a glance.However, this is not a major flaw. After all, everyone has different tastes. Some users may just like this kind of keycaps with a lot of content. Besides, changing keycaps is not a big deal.
â–¼ The common upper and lower hull structure outside the keyboard shell, with white on top and black panda color on the bottom. The bottom shell layout is conventional, the three-way cable outlet can be routed according to the user's usage habits, and the two-stage foot support provides users with more angle choices. 2. The 4G receiver is fixed on the upper right position using the principle of magnetic attraction. There are 5 slender non-slip pads around it, which can hold the table firmly to prevent shifting when it is laid flat.
â–¼ This receiver is a bit interesting. It adopts a rare dual-interface design. The USB-A / USB-C interface can be adapted to different device interfaces. This detail is worthy of praise.
▼ The handrest that comes with the Black Canyon Y5 is made of skin-like material, and the area is large enough. It feels very comfortable to put your wrist on it. Having said that, it’s rare to see a keyboard with a handrest at this price point.
keycap / shaft
â–¼ This is my favorite chapter. The keycaps of Black Canyon Y5 are made of PBT with a frosted surface. As we all know, the advantages of PBT are that it is not easy to get oily. However, PBT is not easy to be oiled compared to ABS. Oiling will still occur after being used for a long time.
â–¼ Turn over and look inside. It has a proper two-color injection molding process. The blue inner layer is extremely rare in mass-produced keyboards. The workmanship of the keycaps is extremely good, the nozzle is smooth, and the edges are neat. This is the advantage of having a good father. The cost is easy to control. If you switch to a smaller brand, these details will cost money.
▼ keycap characters are designed to be translucent, and the surface is treated with a blue coating to block light. The light effect is not dazzling, and the details are great. I don’t know why many new keyboards recently use opaque characters. Is this popular?
â–¼ Black Canyon Y series uses the popular Gasket structure. When you unplug the shaft body, you can see the transparent PVC positioning plate in the middle. The structural parts fit tightly. The internal double-layer silicone pad is very useful for reducing the noise when typing on the keyboard. Effect.
â–¼ shafts, the customized Kaihua shafts used by Black Canyon, the specific parameters are as follows:
â–¼ three shafts have distinct personalities, transparent shell, three-legged colored shaft seat, clear color, internal light guide + extended spring, good feel clear. 's independent trigger mechanism, sealed sealing treatment, and the axis solution of the closed wall structure can provide better dust-proof performance and better guarantee the service life. Currently, these three axes can only be experienced in the Black Canyon series and cannot be purchased individually. However, I am very curious about the difference between these three switches in , so in addition to the Canngling switches that come with the keyboard, I also persuaded the store to sell 20 pieces of Danxia switches and Yanmo switches to me separately, so I can share them with you.
â–¼ Cangling axis: My favorite axis among the three, and it is also the most beautiful axis in my opinion. The paragraph feeling is clear, the knocking sound is crisp and clear, and it has a strong paragraph feeling when pressed. It is not easy to accidentally touch and is very suitable for typing. However, this shaft is also the loudest shaft and is not suitable for use in places with many people.
▼ Danxia axis: linear axis, conduction stroke 1.30±0.4mm, extremely fast triggering, similar to a fast silver axis, smooth feel, and almost no noise throughout the process. The trigger is fast, the rebound follows the hand, the axis is stable, and the feel consistency is excellent. I searched for this shaft, and almost all of them are priced close to 3 yuan per piece. Calculated, the cost of the shaft body alone is close to 300 yuan.
â–¼ smoke axis: advance paragraph axis. This kind of shaft has an obvious segmented feel. It feels hard at first when you press it, and it feels smooth when you continue to press it. It is a bit similar to the feeling of pressing bubble bag when you were a child. I personally don't like this kind of shaft very much, but there are many people who do. The more famous axes in this area include moon white axes, panda axes, etc.
▼ In terms of lighting, the keyboard itself also has built-in lighting effects, which can be switched through shortcut keys.Black Canyon Y5 supports 16.8 million color display, and can adjust brightness, speed, color, direction, breathing and other modes at will. Friends who like lighting should like it. It is worth mentioning that the keycap fonts have a blue coating, so the light-transmitting area of ​​the characters is also deep blue. The colorful lights from the bottom of the keycaps and the blue fonts echo each other, and the desktop atmosphere is still very good.
Summary
Y series is Black Canyon’s model that focuses on the mid-to-high end, and it can be seen that there are quite a few bright spots. Mainstream Gasket architecture, double-layer sound insulation cotton, three-mode connection, hot-swappable switches/keycaps, RGB backlight, special switching modes are not turned off, and a large-size magnetic hand rest and exclusive switches are added. etc. To be honest, the current keyboard market is still quite involution. Although the Y series of Black Canyon is not top-notch, it is still quite competitive with this set of configurations at this price.
As for the shortcomings, as I said before, the hardware configuration is fine, but the design needs some work. Of course, it may be that Black Canyon is used to exaggeration. Although it can be seen that the overall style is restrained and elegant, the details are still not HOLD. In addition to too much character information, I think the biggest problem is the imbalance caused by the digital battery display window and the superfluous design of four smiling face battery indicator lights. It is said that it is necessary to adjust the two battery prompts, and they are close to each other, which seriously destroys the simplicity of the entire keyboard.
That’s it. I am Zhaohua Feng, follow me and I will continue to bring you more interesting and good articles. See you in the next article.
