Tesoro Excalibur SE Spectrum Review 6

Tesoro Excalibur SE Spectrum Review

Value & Conclusion »

Driver

There is no software driver support for the Tesoro Excalibur SE Spectrum, with all functionality being hardware based. As such, I have chosen to combine the driver and performance pages into one.

Performance


The Excalibur SE Spectrum from Tesoro offers toggling between 6- and N-key rollover USB using Fn + Ins/Del respectively, both of which tested successfully using Aqua's test. Switch Hitter confirmed no chatter with these keys in the testing period.


When first plugged into a USB port, the keyboard lights up a static blue on all its LEDs. There are five brightness control steps (Fn + Up/Down arrows, 0/25/50/75/100%), and Fn + Menu toggles through all available color options. The Tesoro Excalibur SE Spectrum has multicolor LEDs supporting purple, blue, red, green, yellow, white, and violet to choose from for a total of 29 color shades. You cannot mix and match the various colors per switch, so do not expect anywhere near the complex backlighting options other keyboards, including Tesoro's own Gram Spectrum, offer. Backlighting was mostly uniform, except for the T in Tesoro in the top-right corner and all the pad-printed legends that of course block the light. The white also had a light blue hue to it, so there was definitely a higher frequency bias in the visible light spectrum here.












There are a total of ten lighting effects to choose from by using the Fn + Left/Right arrow keys, including the static lighting, and some of them are shown above. The single-color effects can all have their color changed by using Fn + Menu as before, and the other effects are variations of reactive typing wherein you would have either the actuated key light up in a chosen color, light up in a random color, or not light up with the others being backlit instead. As I said before, it is fairly simple backlighting, and the absence of a dedicated LED driver is the main reason for its simplicity. This way, Tesoro segments their products such that the Gram lineup remains at the top, I suppose.


The switch feels just like the newer Cherry MX Blue switch, except for that the tactile and clicky feedback is perhaps dialed up to 11. The GIF above illustrates how these optical switches work, and again, it is similar to the other optical IR switches we saw before, wherein an IR laser is interrupted by the downward motion of the switch stem, which in turn actuates the keystroke. This helps with minimizing debounce noise and keeps metal to metal contact low, which prevents oxidation of the metal surfaces in a mechanical switch, although the latter is not really valid anymore since we have a metal lead here anyway and Cherry and clones of Cherry MX switches use gold-plated metal parts to keep oxidation to a minimum these days. Another claim here is the ultra-fast response time (for switch actuation, not the time between the key's depression and the keystroke's result on your monitor) of 0.1 ms, but we do not currently have the means to reliably test this. These switches have the same ~2.1 mm actuation and 4 mm total travel distance with the 50 g rated actuation force as the Cherry MX Blue switches. In testing, I measured an average actuation force of 50.84 g across twenty keys, which is on the higher side, but take that number with a grain of salt considering how non-linear the force diagram is for these clicky switches.


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 Tesoro Excalibur SE Spectrum sample at ~105 WPM. For context, you can find sound clips from other keyboards here, including those with tactile and clicky switches. I did bottom out here, although it is definitely possible not to do so if you practice enough.

There are a couple other onboard control features to mention here. The keyboard supports up to three saved profiles, all of which can host their own lighting effect and macro recordings/assignments. Fn + Print Screen/Scroll Lock/Pause Break toggles through the three profiles. In order to begin macro recording, hit Fn + Home and the Game Mode indicator LED will start blinking. Note that you can only assign a macro to the F1-F4 keys, so you have to pick one of these before following the pick up with the actual recording of the macro (up to twenty keystrokes total, delay not counted), which you would finish by pressing Fn + Home again to end your recording. Onboard macro recording is always a crude compromise, and this is no different. So between the three profiles and the four macro assignments per profile, you can save up to twelve macros onboard, but you will also have to remember which macro does what on which profile.


The next set of intriguing onboard control consists of the ability to record static and dynamic backlighting. The information above is from the manual and does a decent job of explaining how to do so, although in practice, it is again limited due to the twenty-nine total colors you can choose from. There is one example static recording lighting effect already, which lights up the left half of the alphanumeric keys to suit MMOs/RPG games, so you can use that as a starting point and go from there.
Next Page »Value & Conclusion
View as single page
Dec 27th, 2024 02:34 EST change timezone

New Forum Posts

Popular Reviews

Controversial News Posts