IBM 5155 Portable PC review (capacitive buckling springs)

[Chyros]

A first for the channel, this time we have a whole computer! Hope you enjoy the video, this one was quite a bit more labour- and cost-intensive than others so far xD .

[Daniel Beardsmore]

Based on your comments, I'm guessing that you've got a Latitude D5xx there. From my experience, D4xx (mini) and D6xx (premium) were nice, and D5xx (lame) was not.

[snuci]

Love the review. The 5155 is a classic and the keyboard is awesome. Thanks for doing a review with both the vintage keyboard and matching computer. I appreciate it.

[Menuhin]

I actually learned something also a vintage computer from this review - unlike if the video talks only about the key feel of some switches, just like watching videos of people tasting some exotic tea or scotch that the audience can only listen to how they review the taste.

Your review of this vintage computer is actually better than many of other reviewers. But if you go much deeper into a vintage computer, than it is no longer a keyboard-oriented review.

[tigpha]

Thanks Thomas, very nice review. The personal childhood connection with the machine adds a dimension that is often lacking when the reviewer concentrates only on the mechanical and electronic facts and figures -- much like cars and houses, these are things and places where people lived in, and grew up with. Our tools shape us, just as we shape them.

[Clavius]

Great review, like the other ones on your site! I am using the 5155 keyboard on my modern PC using a RJ11 socket hooked up to Soarers converter. Absolutely loving it. Happy to learn a bit about the computer it came with (which I don't have).

[JP!]

Awesome review. I have wanted one of these for a while.

[davkol]

derp

[Daniel Beardsmore]

The screen on the D530 (?) was so bad it was almost greyscale. Laptop screens are all terrible (and nobody has ever explained why) but this was truly abhorrent. The older D600 is so much nicer, even if the keyboard is like typing on chewed-up gristle.

[davkol]

derp

[Hak Foo]

I replaced my T420 with an X230 tablet to get the IPS screen; even as a 1366x768 screen it's far better.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

Laptop screens suffer from specific problems that nobody is able to explain. One of them is that the backlighting is vertically graded, and this wasn't improved with LEDs. So a black window will range vertically from jet black to grey. It's not insurmountable, as some laptops manage even illumination, including Sony and Apple. I guess with CCFL backlighting, the lamps had to go between the hinges to avoid being snapped, and I guess the LED strip goes there too.

The other big problem is that colour purity (saturation) is very poor. You can get vivid red out of a cheap desktop TN panel, but even a super-duper Apple jet-black-everywhere laptop display still can't put out vivid red. It may have improved more recently.

I've never knowingly seen a wide gamut display, but I get a similar effect if I remote into my laptop via RDP: suddenly all the colours—which seemed fairly reasonable—appear much more saturated. Red is the colour I notice the most, but all the colours are washed out.

It's got better. I still remember the first time I used a laptop at all, and noticing how pale all the colours on a colour LCD were. The irony is that the first thing I noticed when I switched from (an old worn-out) CRT to (S-IPS) LCD was that the colours on my new flat screen were dramatically more saturated, despite supposedly a big drop-off in colour gamut.

If anything, S-IPS colour saturation seems to be marginally inferior to cheaper panels. I do have a particular curiosity with how pale lavender shades are displayed and differentiated (colours that cheaper panels seem to fail on) where only my S-IPS displays appear to be correct, but without getting a spider monkey thing I don't know which screens are correct and how accurate they all are. Maybe it's my screens that are wrong!

[davkol]

derp

[Daniel Beardsmore]

I tried our intranet site at another desk, and the alternating white/lavender stripes for table rows weren't even visible: it was just white. I managed to adjust the monitor's levels to get the stripes to appear on both the screens, but they rarely come out the same shade that I see on old LG.display S-IPS panels.

If you find that girl, ask her for a colour that describes Alps SKCMAT in a single two-syllable word. Something that phonetically and visually fits in with "amber" and "salmon" and that covers that amazing green shade. I reject "neon green" as it's patent nonsense: neon lamps are red-orange, not green! (Dai-Ichi CL-1145 is far worse, as it's well outside the gamut of my display. Razer orange is also a truly weird shade of orange that's low in saturation yet still out of gamut, even though gamut limitation is primarily saturation.)

[depletedvespene]

If you find that girl, ask her for a colour that describes Alps SKCMAT in a single two-syllable word. Something that phonetically and visually fits in with "amber" and "salmon" and that covers that amazing green shade.

Oh, «ceruleanish chartreuse» is off the tables, then.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

Probably.

[Chyros]

I held a discussion about the slider colour at some point, and most people agreed on either "lime" or "neon green". I think lime is fine, but neon green is better, and besides, it's the colour that the discoverer called it :p .

[Daniel Beardsmore]

It's not lime colour and neon isn't green. The name has to match the colour; you can't just pick some random colour that sounds good. SKCMAT is a vivid blue-green shade, while limes are yellow-green.

The first time I saw anything that matched Sandy's catalogue entry for SKCMAT was the Dokiu Saver. I've preserved the photos:

http://telcontar.net/KBK/KBref/#Dokiu-Saver

Someone else clearly knew about them but like so many things they had to be rediscovered. I think someone else somewhere has photographed pine SKCMAT, but most examples are bamboo.

"Neon Green" is also a format that contradicts "Dark Blue", in that it's not related to linear green. In fact, "Cream Damped" should be "Damped Cream", to correspond with "Tall Cream" or "Click Grey", although maybe it's the Cherry switches whose names are backwards … (SKCC Cream and Tall Cream are directly related, though.)

I don't hold any hope that anyone will ever find a concise word for "colourless" to replace "white" in all the switches that are not pigmented white (and likewise "white" switchplates). Cherry use "clear" but think of "clear" as being substantially transparent — these are what I'd call "clear" sliders:

http://www.kbdmania.net/xe/photo/8251885

"Colourless" is a bit too long of a word — something short but accurate.

[E3E]

I held a discussion about the slider colour at some point, and most people agreed on either "lime" or "neon green". I think lime is fine, but neon green is better, and besides, it's the colour that the discoverer called it :p .

Except he didn't exactly discover it. People were making jabs at the high price of DKSaver with SKCM Greens before nubbinator found a DocuTech with them: https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=52 ... msg1159822

They were technically found in Korea before they were found here. The only switch that we discovered recently that has been completely undocumented elsewhere is the Striped Amber switch.

SKCM Green is how I default. Neon for familiarity with people who are obsessed with the myth of the switch. Lime is the bureaucratic name of the switch.

[seebart]

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[Daniel Beardsmore]

o_O