copying and pasting it over here, keep in mind some things mentioned will be redundant when moved over here since they'll be making references to this very thread
all pictures from within the thread can be found in
this album. They may not make much sense without the context though
This is just a little 'review' of buying from unicomp. I'll mostly be focusing on the negative, because nothing was really positive above what would be expected. I bought from a deskthority groupbuy, and I had no problems with the groupbuy itself, the guy organising it did a great job. My camera is pretty damn bad, and I have to literally take the pictures within a white box to get them to come out viewable.
From the getgo, I couldn't buy an ISO left shift in green or any 1.25/1.5u custom colour keys, and I couldn't order custom keys with non-standard characters printed on them (ie: arrow keys). These weren't offered, so I can't complain about them being missing even if it sucks - but it's part of the experience of ordering something from them, so I'll list it regardless.
I'd ordered through a groupbuy, so I can't fully talk about the packaging conditions of the keys. It seemed fine though - the actual individual items within my order were seperated into
baggies and labelled, which is good/fine; the spacebars were wrapped in bubblewrap.
Onto the actual recieved items,
here's a list of what I bought, and the condition of the items that I recieved.
The Good: the pearl spacebar has a very nice rough texture, as does the black backspace (somewhat surprisingly, the full sets had some
weird wear on them as if they'd been used before...). The Panic key and yellow blanks turned out well (even if I'd bought them due to UC's limited range).
The actual bottom piece of the two-piece caps are either
as thick or thicker than the originals (left is the original). They vary in quality, some do not have the rounded corners for example, some are black rather than grey, but overall, it doesn't seem too awful. That being said, I do prefer the original bottoms; I'm unsure if that's because it's what I'm used to, or a structural difference, but I won't hold it against them anyhow.
Onto the bad...
As listed, the spacebar had a
broken stabilizer holder.
The green right-shift doesn't come back up when actuated, my assumption is because one of the pegs isn't hollowed out enough.
Here's a pic of what I mean. Fixable with some whittling, but not something I'd expect to have to fix. Something similar can be said of the
ISO Enter which has a random extra peg as well as lacking a stabilizer. The key has insane wiggle to the point of it only registering being pressed about 30% of the time, so it's completely unusable currently. I'm unsure on what exactly is the cause of that, I'd assume it's the peg as I do not have my stabilizer attached to the board on my original enter key currently.
I'm not super happy with the printing, the keys on the left in
this picture are unicomp bought, the ones on the right are from an 1989 M, my camera is awful so it's hard to see what I mean, but the print of the originals are really crisp in comparison. The Left '3' key is one of the things I recieved instead of the custom printed key I asked for. The standard of an old M is pretty high up there, but I'd even go as far to say that this is below an acceptable standard.
they dont seem to hide that if you browse their store and look at their printed items though, so I guess I got what I should've expected.
once again, as a disclaimer, none of this bares any relevance to the running of the groupbuy itself; as a late joiner I was very happy with how it went