I was surprised by CORSAIR's announcements of the Slipstream and Capellix technologies all the way back at CES this year, but not as much as how long it took them to get a keyboard with these to market. The K57 RGB wireless is pretty much just that—a proof of concept device to introduce people to these two features in a keyboard. It does the job very well too, with everything working as intended and then some, but the rest of the keyboard is what makes this a hard sell at the current $99.99 price point. In a world where you can get similarly specced wired or wireless keyboards with mechanical switches at a lower price, including older offerings from CORSAIR themselves, justifying a Ben Franklin for a membrane keyboard is not the wisest of choices unless you absolutely want a membrane keyboard.

Sure, CORSAIR did their best to make this deal as appealing to the masses as they could. The including of a high degree of customization, be it onboard or via iCUE, and dedicated keys galore helps make this a more rounded product. Software support remains second to none even if iCUE is becoming bloated in a stark contrast to the efficient lighting from the Capellix LEDs in use here. A gaming keyboard this is not, no matter how CORSAIR tries to spin it. I would much rather have seen this with only Slipstream at a lower price and marketed to the working professional, but I can see why CORSAIR went this route. Extrapolating further down that route, however, is surely a mechanical keyboard with more features and better build quality at an incremental price increase that would offer more for the majority of CORSAIR's customer base as it comes to the $100+ keyboard market. It is tough to amortize the R&D costs of new technologies, and that surely played a big role in the cost of the K57 RGB wireless, but unless the overall feature set is to your exact needs, I would hold off or look elsewhere.