OCZ Alchemy series Illuminati Keyboard review - Analisys
Author: Vedran Dakic
Date: 07 Oct 2009

The main part of the Illuminati keyboard has 106 standard keys, arranged in the most logical way that you could have gotten used to in at least the last 15 years.
There’s an additional 14 keys used for multimedia control and to start default applications for web, mail and search, as well as an additional key used to switch the illumination color.

OCZ Alchemy series Illuminati provides you with the choice of blue or red backlight. This is a nice feature since some colors are irritating to some people. This way you get a choice, which can even be a monotony breaker. Aside from the changing of color, there’s also a turning wheel that enables you to choose the intensity of the backlight. We found that even on the maximum setting the illumination of the keys is not irritating in a totally dark room. This might be the result of the two bigger LED stripes on the side of the keyboard, which illuminate the surface, ie. your desk, and provide an additional light source which will contract your pupils so the keys won’t glow so bright in the completely dark space.

The key design resembles the one from notebooks, as the keys are low profile with very little vertical movement. The total travel distance is 2.5 mm, which is less than most other desktop keyboards. The keys are rubber coated, which gives Illuminati a quite different feel under the fingers. We would like to point out that this is not a heavy duty keyboard for people typing dozens of pages of text each day, and it has a switch life of 5 million cycles, with some other keyboards having more than four times as much.

From the ergonomics side, we would like to mention the very good wrist support which provides a comfortable rest so your hands are not in the air while typing. On the down side, the angle at which the keyboard sits in its elevated position is too small so you have the feeling of typing on a flat surface. We really like the "jog-dial" thingy on the bottom right part of the keyboard and the light coming from the side of the keyboard, as shown on the picture below: