The gist
If you are in a hurry this is the gist:
The good
- €139. Very aggressively priced mechanical keyboard with RGB backlight
- Lots of backlight modes and an easy to use software to customize them
- Full size and TKL options
- ANSI and ISO options
- MX Blue, Red, Brown options
- Clean design with minimal branding
- Very low quality PCB-job
- Badly designed legends
- Bad acoustic
- Rubber coating
- Cable management could be an issue
A little late in the RGB bandwagon, Cooler Master finally released its own RGB keyboard. It seems you can’t be a serious manufacturer if you don’t have at least one RGB model in your catalog. Cooler Master took their time to release the MasterKeys, they probably wanted to be sure to do it right...
CM is one of the few keyboard manufacturers that look at both the EU and US markets. We all know how problematic is to release a product in Europe, so I can only praise CM’s efforts in that regards. Unfortunately the same care should be devoted to product development, what is really lacking here is attention to details and a better beta test phase.
Let’s start from the beginning.
The outside
The box is very simple and nicely done. Contrary to the Novatouch (but similarly to other CM products) there’s no waste of packaging material, so it gets my 5-stars eco-friendly sigil. Thank you CM.
Aesthetically the keyboard is very close to the Novatouch. Very simple lines, no branding, black and elegant. Everything a gaming keyboard nowadays is not. Kudos to CM design choice and I hope they will keep this trend.
The Pro S is the TKL version, a full size will also be available but I explicitly requested the smaller brother.
Unfortunately they once again used the nefarious rubber coating on the case. Let me stress on this: despite what fanboys have to say, the rubber coating has absolutely no functional property. It’s there just because it’s cool. It attracts dirt, dust, grease and it’s impossible to clean. I spilled one small drop of tea on it and now it is stained forever.
The connection port is a micro-USB. The cable is good quality braided and gold plated. USB port on the cable is L-shaped and the connector on the keyboard is on the right. There’s no way to change cable management/orientation and I can see an issue if you need to route the cable far to the right.
All in all it’s a fine board. Looks and feels sturdy, it’s pretty heavy and stands still on your desktop thanks to the more than adequate rubber feet (tilting on the back to obtain a higher angle).
Keycaps and switches
The bad news is that the legends are badly designed, or actually, they seem a bit rushed with noobish alignment errors all over the places.
Let’s count together:
- PAGE UP is aligned to the center while PAGE DOWN to the left
- In the "' key, the ' is actually a ,
- The -_ legends are both incredibly badly aligned
- In the ~` key, ` is badly aligned to the bottom
- & is too thick
- ^ is too thin
- < and > are too thin and aligned too high
- ESC is too big
- (9 and )0 are not vertically aligned between each other
- , and . are not vertically aligned
- % is too big
- { is badly aligned horizontally to [ (same as ]})
- some letters don’t look correctly aligned to the center or at least to the visual center
That being said, the font type is not the worst I’ve seen and the overall look is good.
Looking under the keycaps you find a nice white plate. Very intelligently CM used white for better radiosity and an augmented Christmas Tree backlight effect.
In fact light bleeds more than it shines through the legends, but let’s talk about that later.
The keycaps are the same old OEM coated with lasered legends that we all love to hate. Nothing bad and nothing good to say about them. There’s very little you can do with keycaps if you want them backlight compatible.
The switches are Cherry original with the very sexy transparent housing. In my case I have MX Browns but Blue and Red will be available too.
Stabs are Cherry plate mounted.
Typing experience
Cherry MX browns are light and just vaguely tactile. The keyboard feels pretty good and returns a satisfying typing experience. The MasterKeys is a solid mechanical keyboard even without backlight.
It is not without fault, though. Before going any further let’s listen to a sound sample.
MasterKeys audio sample
This is a detail of a single keypress:
MasterKeys keypress
Some of you might have heard that little “ping” at the end of each keypress. Here’s an amplified detail of what happens, pump up the volume:
MasterKeys reverb
It’s not terrible to the point of being irritating, but still annoying. I think the keyboard structure should be rethought to optimize acoustics. To be honest even expensive Filco keyboards suffer of similar issues, but definitely CM didn’t care much about acoustic. Again, this could have been solved with some beta test. (Just so you know, the WhiteFox has no reverb whatsoever).
In the inside
Screw driver time! Let’s open this bitch!
4 screws total. 1 under the main label, 1 voids the warranty, 2 en plein air.
Removed the top casing (which requires some craftsmanship) you have to deal with two more screws that hold the plate to the bottom. Unscrewed the plate you are presented with a very intricate PCB.
The main processor is a Holtek HT32F1654 (32-bit ARM Cortex-M3 @ 72 MHz); the LED drivers I believe are three little buggers called MBIA043GP, for which I couldn’t find any additional info. The RGB LEDs I’m told are a CM own product, designed for the industrial market by a super secret division I’m not allowed to talk about (no kidding).
The PCB is dirty with some solder paste residue, the solder points are clearly “cold” with a very bad solder job in at least three points.
In all fairness this is a pre-production sample, but it’s clear that CM is trying to keep costs as low as possible in the production lane.
Let there be light
This won’t be long. CM did their homework when it comes to backlighting and the MasterKeys has everything you need… and you don’t need actually.
Video time (sorry upside down
).Light bleeds everywhere, CM went as far as making the plate white so the effect is even more dramatic. If you don’t look for them, you barely notice the legends. CM succeeded in releasing one of the best USB tanning device; whether that is good or bad is up to you to decide.
The number of Backlight options is almost embarrassing. Apart from the usual all-on, breathing, rainbow, you get some as fancy as useless ripple effect, rain, color cycle, starry night and even a Snake-like mini game.
I’ve found the “custom mode” probably the nicest of all and the only one I would probably use. By pressing FN+F10 you enter a backlight editing mode where you can pick the keys you want lighted (or not) and of course their color. You can do that directly on the keyboard or you can more easily customize your unicorn vomit keyboard with a dedicated software (Windows only).
The software is less horrific than you’d expect for a gaming keyboard, it’s a bit slow but well designed and it also takes care of updating the keyboard firmware (when CM release a new one).
Unfortunately the software is just for backlighting, you can’t change the layout in any way, or edit the macros (that the keyboard seems to support).
Every single light effect I tried is just distracting, whatever you are doing on your computer you don’t want the keyboard to spit 16millions colors on your face. You can surely have some fun showing your friends how cool is your new gaming device… if that’s what you are after… but apart from that you’ll probably just use the all-on/all-off mode and possibly the custom mode.
This has nothing to do with the MasterKeys of course, it’s true for any keyboard of this kind, and Cooler Master here did everything right.
What I was promised and couldn’t actually test is the SDK. CM will soon release a set of developer’s tools that should let you interact with the keyboard in the most interesting ways.
It will be used mostly in games I reckon, for example the keyboard could change color based on your character health status, but in the right hands the API could become a very interesting tool.
An LED could flash when you get a new mail for example, or when your twitter feed updates. You could create new backlight effect or even mini games. I hope CM will release the SDK soon and I’m looking forward to putting my hands on it. Until then I find RGB backlight just a gimmick.
More features
The keyboard has an interesting FN layer, mostly dedicated to media keys (play, pause, volume up/down, …) but no darn MUTE key. Why?! Only CM knows.
FN+F1/2/3/4 are dedicated to LED management, color and intensity.
FN+F5/6/7/8 is the repeat key multiplier. Useful mostly in gaming, you can make each key press more or less “aggressive”.
FN+F9 windows lock.
FN+F10 lets you program the LEDs Custom mode.
FN+F11/12 macro recording.
Anti-ghosting, N-key roller and a processor that is faster than my first computer. CM Europe couldn’t say what the polling rate is, but I’m pretty sure it’s 1ms (+ debouncing).
Conclusions
I hate wall-of-text reviews in forum posts, let’s try to sum it up.
The MasterKeys Pro S is a backlit TKL mechanical keyboard with a MSRP of €139. The review could stop here.
You are getting a nice looking mechanical keyboard with full RGB backlight for a price last year you could only dream to get a decent keyboard (let alone backlit).
Unfortunately to do so Cooler Master had to cut costs everywhere they could. The PCB quality and QC are evidently low, keycaps design is rushed, acoustic just so-so, API not ready at launch. They had one year to design it right and they really missed a great opportunity.
I do not understand why they don’t ask for feedback before going live. I would probably do it for free, but the goal here is not to build the perfect keyboard, just a good product that sells to the average user. We are probably not the target reference but it hurts nonetheless, because it would take so little to fix the few issues.
So, it’s not a quality keyboard, but it’s a good deal for €139 (surely less in the coming months), BUT of course they have to fix at least the PCB quality, because as it is now it’s pretty bad and I don’t know if I could recommend it.
One last thing. I’m pretty sure the firmware and CPU are more than capable of handling custom layouts. CM already have a good software to update the backlighting, why not let people also customize the layout? Backspace in place of | is something I’d love to have as the Mute key, and possibly PGUP/DOWN on FN+Arrow UP/DOWN too.
but CM did a nice job here, I'd swap the caps anyway.
The community is ready to help..
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