Closer Examination

The MK Fission is a minimalist keyboard with small bezels, no wrist rest, a subtle curve at the bottom, and standard full size ANSI layout. There is no difference between the black and white versions aside from the keycaps themselves, provided you have the same switches used for both. There is no branding on the keyboard aside from the Fission product logo on the space bar, and even this is tastefully done in my opinion with a front legend. The good thing is, the MK Fission adopts a "standard" keycap layout meaning you have a huge variety of replacement keycaps choices including just replacement space bars if that was not to your liking.


Not much going on the back either, with a QC sticker on a corner and another brand/logo sticker in the middle. There are four rubber pads to prevent the keyboard from sliding off your desk, and there are two feet which can be raised as well. These feet have a rubberized finish to them too, although it was not very easy to lift them since the gap between the feet and the bottom panel was smaller than I would have preferred. Not a deal breaker by any means though.


On the top edge facing your monitor is a white accent bar behind which are RGB LEDs. The white plastic you see here helps diffuse the light evenly, and the accent bar extends to the side edges as well. From the middle comes out the keyboard cable which is non-detachable, has no braiding which is how I personally prefer it and terminates in a male USB Type-A connector. USB 2.0 will suffice, although with no lack of USB 3.0 (3.1 Gen 1) ports these days that should not be an issue anymore.


The keycaps have a Cherry OEM profile, which is the most popular these days and you will notice it immediately by the sculpted rows that are of the same height as most mechanical keyboards out there today. They are also floating style as noted by the absence of a top panel, and this means the keycaps are easier to remove/install and the keyboard will also be easier to clean but at the expense of some light bleed. Given there is only white backlighting, this should not be an issue. The MK Fission comes in a choice of black or white keycaps as mentioned, and both are made of ABS plastic with an average wall thickness of 1.04-1.20 mm which is thicker than average and nice to see. The legends themselves are doubleshot, including the front and top legends as applicable, so they will not wear off easily unlike most mainstream keycaps that use pad printing of legends. However, MK (via Ducky) here have used seamless doubleshot keycaps which have the benefit of all legends and letters looking more natural and not cut off where you have a loop. For instance, P with a loop at the top is now complete and has no gap in it. This was introduced by Ducky late last year and to achieve this Ducky have had to use something new.


See those bars on the underside, black on the black keycaps and white on the white keycaps? Those plastic bars are what allowed the manufacturing of these seamless doubleshot ABS keycaps. These come with a drawback, however, as they are more opaque than translucent- especially the black bars. The picture in the middle above is a black keycap with a light source directly under it, and you can see the black bars preventing light from evenly illuminating the legends. Things are much better with the white keycaps as the white bars do not show up as prominently and the legends appear uniformly backlit. So if this is going to be a distraction to you, go with the white keycaps. They also allow more light through, or at the very least appear brighter to my naked eyes. That said, there are some legends that are laser etched on the Fn and arrow keys which will not be illuminated.


The keycap puller included works great as evident above, and helps confirm that the MK Fission uses genuine Cherry MX switches. I show above the version with Cherry MX Blue switches, and the other one had the Cherry MX Brown switches as indicated previously. These are the non-RGB switches with black housing and that works just fine with a single color backlighting as was the case before everyone went RGB. The MK Fission uses Cherry stabilizers on the larger keys and keycaps, including the space bar. One interesting thing here is that the space bar keycap has two sets of stem holes so you could move the space bar horizontally in case you wanted to try out some different keycap layouts in the bottom row. But I have since been informed this is more to do with compliance on different manufacturer products that use an offset or shorter space bar.