Dave Alcock takes you on a journey through the realm of clickety keyboards

KEYBOARDS ARE THE TRUE KINGS of input devices. They predate mice by almost 15 years, and thanks to companies like IBM-who set the standard in terms of the shape we know today-they have become perhaps the most easily recognizable and usable devices out there. In fact that tell-tale shape ensures that we can jump onto any PC we see and immediately know how to interact with it. If you think of a keyboard, you usually end up with an image of that standard 104/105-key ANSI layout imprinted into your mind.

Membrane, dome, capacitive, and scissor-switch keyboards still make up the majority of the keyboards that are out there in the wild today, mostly due to office and industry use. But before we go any further on this, what we will say is that these boards are perfectly fine products. There is a reason they are still being used in such vast numbers right now, and that’s because they’re cheap, accurate, and do the job they’re designed to do darn well.

However, if you want to take it a step further, there are of course mechanical keyboards. These are nothing new-in fact most early keyboards were mechanical, with many phased out in favor of the cheaper options we just mentioned. The IBM Model M and Model F were the most sought-after of the older mechanical boards back in the day, and almost 30 or 40 years later these buckling-spring bundles of joy are still priced high enough to make your eyes water, coveted by many a coder and developer, even at Maximum PC. So let’s dive a little deeper into the world of the mechanical keyboard.

Mechanical Keyboards vs Everything Else

SO WHAT is the difference then? Well compared to other keyboards, mechanical switches are just that: Mechanical. They have a mechanism inside that moves and creates the action that sends the key-press signal. How this happens changes slightly depending on the switch type, but we will cover this in more detail later on. The most common PC keyboards are membrane keyboards, while dome boards are still seen in industry quite a lot as well. Membrane keyboards use three layers, with the middle layer just there to space apart the top and bottom conductive layers so that they are not sending a signal to each other constantly. Once you press the key-switch down, the top and the bottom layers touch, complete a circuit, and send a signal. There is no mechanical action involved.

Dome keys are similar to membrane ones, but they have a dome that collapses to give the user some tactile feedback. There are also hybrids, known as memchanical (or membranical, depending on which marketing guru you listen to) keyboards, which are membrane boards that use a clicker to make them feel somewhat similar to mechanical keyboards. This keeps the price down but doesn’t really give the user any benefits over the feeling of using the keys.

Mechanical switches are preferred over other switches because of their reliability, repeatability, and stability. If it has “ability” at the end, a mechanical switch probably does it better than the rest. Mechanical switches have far tighter tolerances, and they should feel more consistent between each other compared to other switch types. This enables users to really get a preference over what they like to use, and this can then improve productivity or performance in gaming.