Home page » Peripherals

Search:

Refine search for Peripherals

Saitek is a brand well known for its gaming controllers but it might come as a surprise to find that it also offers gaming keyboards. What, you may well wonder, actually is a gaming keyboard. After all, most keyboards have the keys in more or less the same place and can be used for any game. This is certainly true, but with the eclipse, Saitek has cleverly latched onto the fact that many gamers like to play in the dark. If you’ve ever fired up a scary game with your headphones on, you’ll know how effective a dark environment can be to really draw you into the game.

The flaw with this scenario though is a rather prosaic one in that if you’re playing in the dark, it makes it rather difficult to see the keyboard: which is something of a problem. I can vouch for this, having on many occasions found myself pouring over the keys from the light of the monitor to find the desired one, only to give up and turn a side light on. In the heat of battle, this is not what you want to be doing. So Saitek has come up with a neat solution to this little conundrum – a keyboard with backlighting.

The Eclipse is actually the second attempt, with the first – the imaginatively titled ‘Gamer’s keyboard’ offering something similar. However, this one is superior in that the cool blue backlight actually shines through the keys themselves. The keys are silver with the letter shapes cut out, enabling the blue light to shine through. The silver against black effect is really rather cool, but the Eclipse really does look its best in the dark. I must admit to having blue lighting shining from the front of my Antec tower case, and in combination with the blue lights of a Razer Diamondback mouse, it gives a cool, futuristic look to the system. This is helped by the spacey design, with spoke-like corners and moulded sections around the lights at the top and the space bar.

Saitek has dispensed with the separate keypad that its previous model had, but that’s no real loss. The layout is otherwise conventional. You might think that along with a flashy blue light Saitek would choose to festoon the keyboard with dials and buttons, in the manner of many Microsoft and Logitech keyboards. In fact Saitek has kept things tastefully simple with only has four buttons. In my opinion this is a good thing as often by the time you’ve worked out what shortcut key does what and where it is, you’d have been quicker just launching the application in the regular manner anyway.

Add your comment

© 2003-2008 TrustedReviews | About Us | Contact Us | Legal | Privacy | RSS