deskthority

What is the best price/quality mech tenkeyless? Also what is the cheapest tenkeyless?

www.elitekeyboards.com

The leopold is probably the cheapest/easiest to get in the USA, of the decent ones.

http://h30094.www3.hp.com/product.asp?s ... agemode=ca

Never knew HP made tenkeyless boards!
Did they make these already before tenkeyless Filcos got popular?

I figured the leopold would be the best price/quality. Does anyone know of anything that can beat it?

Yes, if you are willing to import from China you can probably get a Plu87 for even less:

http://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=8216 ... id=&pm_id=

349 Yuan ($53 USD, ~37 EUR). Of course you have to add some broker fees and shipping from China, it may come out about the same as the Leopold.

sixty wrote:Never knew HP made tenkeyless boards!
Did they make these already before tenkeyless Filcos got popular?

I think they were around already in 2009. I'm not sure when they were officially introduced, but I guess that in the world of rubber domes that's really a niche product.

EDIT:
http://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/GetPDF.asp ... 647ENW.pdf
I found this brochure featuring the said keyboard. It's dated February 2009.

In all seriousness, though, the best value tenkeyless mechanical at the moment would be Noppoo Choc Mini. I have checked mine for any defects both externally and internally and have not found any (cue rip-rippety-rip-rip-ster, an overused Lego picture and his frightfully witty references to faeces).

Soldering on the noppoo looked terrible though. Then again the Plu87 is made by the same guys, so its probably equally bad in terms of soldering quality. You get what you pay for?

Probably. The soldering on mine looks solid, though. So far there haven't been too many reports of faulty Chocs considering the amount purchased in the last two months or so... but we can only wait and see if they start failing in large numbers. I don't really expect that (cue obvious Monty Python gag).

Besides, when it's a cheaper mechanical keyboard like this, I feel more confident repairing it by myself in case it happens to crap on me. The Noppoo hasn't done that - a considerably more expensive Filco, on the other hand, was faulty out of the box.

I have no doubt it will be fine even with bad soldering. After all my own soldering is abysmal and some of my mods still live after 2 years!

What's the soldering like in the KBC Poker compared to the Choc Mini?

Its pretty good. There are some ugly flux marks on the dipswitch. I've been told these are only there on the samples since they were manually added.