Performance

There is the basic 6-key rollover USB here out of the box, as Aqua's test confirms. This is fine with me considering the wireless nature of the keyboard as well as its target market. Similarly, no key chatter was detected on all the keys using Switch Hitter.


Backlighting is handled differently here given the keyboard is wireless and has a battery that will run out way quicker with backlighting on vs. off. There is a sensor at the top which detects ambient light and motion near the keys, and this in turn switches backlighting on in a dark environment. You can manually turn it on, as well as control the brightness via the functions pre-programmed into the function row, but at full brightness, the white color is truer to color than any RGB solution I have seen and lights up the legends very well. The keys remain backlit until you stop using them and move your hands away, and even a few centimeters away in any direction will cause the backlighting to automatically stop after ~3 seconds.

This is perhaps also the best point at which to talk about battery life. Given the nature of reviews, I had a limited time to devote to the CRAFT before moving to another keyboard, but I can tell you right away that Logitech's decision to use base backlighting only and in a dark environment in combination with motion detection was a right one - in regular use and at 100% brightness, the keyboard lasted all of 54 hours before the critical battery warning came up. Turn it down to ~50% and it goes past three weeks at ~2-3 hours each day. Logitech claims you will get up to 3 months of use out of the battery; however, they do so without specifying the active hours of use or usage scenario, with the backlighting turned off. Given some of their other non-backlit membrane keyboards last months before a recharge is needed, I wonder if perhaps the use of AA or C/D batteries might not have been better. This also would have countered the effects of battery degradation with time, and unfortunately, I simply do not have the data to draw any conclusions on this at this point in time. This is also where I would have rather seen a more quantitative battery life estimate in the driver. Similarly, the maximum current draw is 500 mA, so using a brick adapter to attempt fast charging will not help.

The tutorial videos do a good job of demonstrating the built-in profiles for most other applications, and to be fair, they are either very simple (tab switching) or cycle through preset options, as with MS Office. It was the contextual awareness that interested me most and thus, I set about testing this in Adobe Photoshop CC. Logitech has done a better job than I expected going in, with contexts changing from tool to tool and also defaulting to the actions that made more sense when there is nothing directly relevant present. When it comes to preset sliders, such as brightness, contrast, and saturation, it also remembers the position of the slider on the screen if a mouse or keyboard was used in conjunction, as seen in the video above. Mouse or keyboard control also takes precedence over the Crown dial here, and despite the slight lag in both the tap to change actions as well as the update seen on the screen, it worked very well where supported. Unfortunately, this is also where I found myself missing more supported actions, and if Logitech had implemented a universal dial action that would have been akin to a mouse-over on a slider on the screen, that would have been nice as there are discrete steps in the dial you can feel which work out better than a mouse wheel or similar would.

As it is now, standalone controllers such as the Palette Expert kit do a much better job here, but there is no denying that the CRAFT in a full keyboard is a much more versatile device. It also implements support in MS Office where others do not, but at the same time, I am left disappointed by the lack of a profile for Adobe Lightroom. Oh, there is also haptic feedback on the Crown that sounds eerily similar to a mirror shutter on an older dSLR camera. This haptic feedback, complete with vibrations, comes when a push/turn action is initiated to get a second task for the dial. There are also visual indicators on the screen for the current action being performed, or even a set of actions available via the tap switch, so this works better than the screen display on the Palette kit.


Since Logitech thought it apt to also send me the MX Master 2S, I was able test the keyboard with their Flow technology, which is accessed under the mouse menu in Logitech Options by switching devices as seen on the previous page. Flow has some limitations yet, such as the inability to drag active files such as videos currently playing into a device, but I made very good use of it when it came to transferring image files and videos from my laptop to my desktop for edits and uploads alike. I also worked on this very review on both computers, and Flow helped me transfer the review's draft in a MS Word file across the two without having to resort to email or a USB drive. As long as you have both computers on the same wireless network, and even a hotspot works here, you can connect up to three computers (Windows or Mac, alike). I will note here that Microsoft developed a similar program called Mouse without Borders, but poor implementation and development as of late have led to no one really being aware of it.

The pre-programmed secondary (primary by default) functions on the top row are also very handy, as are the dedicated keys on the right. These are of course configurable as well, but as mentioned before, I recommend trying them as-is first. Here is the complete list:

• F1-F2: Decrease/Increase display brightness
• F3: Task View
• F4: Action Center (Logitech Options)
• F5: Show/Hide desktop
• F6-F7: Decrease/Increase keyboard backlight brightness
• F8-F10: Media playback control
• F11-F12 + next key: volume control
• 1/2/3: Quick-Switch
• Final set of four keys at the top-right corner: Calculator, Screen capture, App menu, OS key lock;

As always, the sound of a keyboard is based on more than just the switch type. So when comparing sound clips, consider the keyboard as a whole. In this case, I have provided above an example sound clip of me typing on the Logitech CRAFT sample at ~80 WPM. For context, you can find sound clips from other keyboards here, including those with scissor switches. I did bottom out of course, but the combination of the rubber domes and low profile/travel means this is a very quiet keyboard to type on - near perfect for an office with people around. This is also why the microphone is picking up ambient noise as a result of more gain to make up for the lower keyboard noise here. At the same time, the lower travel distance is not to my personal liking, although the keycap curvature does help.