Greek Olivetti is a modern homage to the Cherry G81-3011 HBQ, also known as Olivetti KBD 2811 HBQ. Olivetti boards made by Cherry are known and appreciated within the keyboard community for their rarity and unique blue on beige colour scheme. This board was produced in the late 80s for the Greek market and features a unique sublegend-style. As far as we know only one of these keyboards exists today which was discovered in 2015.
This remake made by GMK uses the original Cherry molds and features full-doubleshot legends, so no pad-printing is used in this set. This keyset is made with the same colours as GMK Blue Alert. The keys use the standard L9 and U9 beige colours, the legends and the accent keys use V4.
Small adjustments were made to modernize this keyset: the modifiers were upgraded to a classic icon mod style which we all already appreciated on GMK 9009. Also the sublegend on the W key was fixed. In the original set Cherry made a mistake and used the Ç key which is not part of the Greek alphabet. This was corrected to the proper small final sigma ς. This key uses a new custom mold to assure a real greek look.
The base kit supports most popular custom layouts like winkeyless, 65%, 75%, true HHKB layout, 78 and 96 key layouts, 660 and 1800 boards. Also ISO-UK support is included. The space bar kit offers blank keys for the popular 2,25u 2,75u and 1,25u split space bar layout and blue accent space bars in 6,25u and 7u.
Hello,
as long as I've been part of this community and hobby I've always liked uncommon sublegends, localisations and special keycaps. One of the sets that I've always adored was the greek Cherry keyset which was produced for olivetti. This is a picture of the keyset:
Most of you probably know how rare these sets are and that it's very difficult to get their hands on one. As this set was produced by Cherry, we still have the opportunity to produce a remake by GMK. To make this happen, I wanna collect interest here. If we get enough responses here, I'll start to look for a vendor and hopefully this will result in a successful group buy, just like 9009 did.
I don't have any renders renders ready but I think that the original pictures already speak for themself. In regard to kit design I want to go with a similar base kit as GMK 9009 had because I think that it was a nearly perfect set. Therefore this set will have icon mods and the text bottom row. The color will remain in olivetti style. The price of this set will most likely be cheaper than 9009 (which already had a perfect value imo) because this set doesn't have the accent keys. With 150 moq 9009 sold for 135€ at mykeyboard.eu + shipping and we'll most likely stay below that. I can't give you a US price right now because of the conversion rates but you should have an idea at what I'm aiming.
That is the 9009 base kit which will be similar to what I'm aiming for this set:
Short summary
The set will be produced in Germany by GMK and it will be made out of abs plastic
The sublegends are part of the mold and they will be doubleshot, no pad printing is used in this set.
The base kit will be similar to GMK 9009, therefore we are aiming at a similar pricing (135€ at 150 moq)
The set will have the original colorway and icon mods like 9009
To-do-list:
Collect interest
Decide about the kit design and some modifier legends
Decide about accent keys (maybe just a set of blue keys esc + return + numpad return)
Find a vendor when the things above are done
And now only the google form is left. Please fill it out (you don't need a google account for it) so that I have an idea about the size of interest, else it'll be rather difficult to find a vendor. Any kind of feedback can be placed in the google form or in the thread here.
If you DO do this set, please take the time to correct the plague that has been the continued appearance of Ç (U+00C7 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C WITH CEDILLA) on the W keycap instead of the proper ς (U+03C2 GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA). I'm willing to bet that Greek people will be grateful that someone actually bothers to correct this oh so very jarring mistake (*).
This is not a minor issue — this obvious error is VERY jarring — for a quick comparison, imagine that an English or Spanish or German keyboard had the keycap between E and T with a letter Я.
(*) I wish we could find out who was responsible for it in the first place.
depletedvespene wrote: ↑If you DO do this set, please take the time to correct the plague that has been the continued appearance of Ç (U+00C7 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C WITH CEDILLA) on the W keycap instead of the proper ς (U+03C2 GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA). I'm willing to bet that Greek people will be grateful that someone actually bothers to correct this oh so very jarring mistake (*).
This is not a minor issue — this obvious error is VERY jarring — for a quick comparison, imagine that an English or Spanish or German keyboard had the keycap between E and T with a letter Я.
(*) I wish we could find out who was responsible for it in the first place.
not so easy man, if you want to put up the money for new molds then go right ahead
A new mold seems to be 150€ and I already had three request regarding the ς cap (modern boards actually use the Σ symbol on it, even if it's already on the S key). I'm currently considering it to add the cap, maybe this would give us quite a few greek buyers. Sadly there are also risks with adding a new mold, due to the age the sharpness of the legends may be different and also the thickness can vary.
There are other issues with the original molds too as another user pointed out, the ψ key is more a ω key with | in the middle, seems like Cherry didn't care about the Greek layout
hansichen wrote: ↑A new mold seems to be 150€ and I already had three request regarding the ς cap (modern boards actually use the Σ symbol on it, even if it's already on the S key). I'm currently considering it to add the cap, maybe this would give us quite a few greek buyers. Sadly there are also risks with adding a new mold, due to the age the sharpness of the legends may be different and also the thickness can vary.
Opinions WILL vary, obviously, but I'd rather have a slightly different-looking ς than an entirely wrong character there. I won't say anything about Ψ (for now).
I can understand that point from the Greek point of view but 95%+ of the buyers would prefer a uniform look and don't care about the actual legends
I'll have a look how this IC develops and I'll do some research into custom molds, then we'll see how to proceed.
Look, for 150€ it's just fine in terms of price (for a MOQ of 150 sets, it's 1€ more per set, nothing). It will be properly Greek then, and it certainly will attract more buyers. I don't think the uniformity will be anything noticeable. You could request a sample of the two (new mold ς vs. ç) and compare them, though I still think ς is just better. It won't look odd as it does now.
2 days have passed so it's time to share the first results of the IC. Overall 59 people want to buy 1 set, 4 people wanna buy 2 sets and 2 people want to buy more than 5 sets, that would make more than half of the moq. This probably excludes potential buyers from Korea and China as those are mostly not active on the western market.
I'm pretty happy about all the interest, I didn't expect such a positive feedback, thanks for your support.
As the first big update I want to present you the first layout design and a new poll regarding the design choice of the Navigation-keys. Here you can see the layout:
Layout Olivetti.jpg (148.12 KiB) Viewed 9659 times
Also I've made a first space bar kit:
Layout Olivetti Space Bar.jpg (14.83 KiB) Viewed 9659 times
This layout uses the old Cherry icon style navigation keys which were used by Cherry on French keysets.
Here you can see the doubleshot version of these keys: w/images/c/c3/G80-2100HDF_001.jpg
This is how it looks with olivetti colors, be aware that this board is a dyesub board and the icons don't look as sharp as on a doubleshot board: https://i.imgur.com/IzlMgpl.jpg
That's a good question, I wish I could include a similar end key but founding 4 new end keys would add at least 4€ to each set at 150 moq so it's not really viable for a small group buy
depletedvespene wrote: ↑If you DO do this set, please take the time to correct the plague that has been the continued appearance of Ç (U+00C7 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C WITH CEDILLA) on the W keycap instead of the proper ς (U+03C2 GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA). I'm willing to bet that Greek people will be grateful that someone actually bothers to correct this oh so very jarring mistake (*).
This is not a minor issue — this obvious error is VERY jarring — for a quick comparison, imagine that an English or Spanish or German keyboard had the keycap between E and T with a letter Я.
(*) I wish we could find out who was responsible for it in the first place.
Thanks for bumping this topic and for the support. I was a bit busy lately but I'll finalize the layout soon and then submit it to GMK for a first render.
