Thursday 4 September 2008

Gaming keyboards: Part 2

Upon further examination, I noticed that some "gaming" keyboards have their own displays too (Logitech G15 for example). So whats the problem with them? One can only consider them as a benefit. They can always display your health/mana values, ammo etc. They are even practical even outside games (ie showing your unread mail count).

But when I say a benefit, I mean waste. A "gamer" who "needs" a display on his keyboard(!) cannot answer me this:

Why would I need a stupid lcd display with a jurassic resolution of whooping 160x43 pixels for displaying anything? Why would I need an additional display even though I'm just right now looking at at 22in 1920x1200 display? So my display has 2304000 pixels. The keyboard one has 6880. So that is a gain of 0.298611111%.

There are at least two problems with this kind of displays:

1. As I mentioned before, they have extremely low resolution and size. Just to demonstrate the resolution look at the picture below:

It is pathetic.

2. They are just faaaar away from the action. Do you know why combat pilots have Heads-Up Displays? It is because they can focus on combat - not on looking at the gauges all over the cockpit. Human vision has a soft focus. That means when you are looking at this sentence you can't see clearly characters on your keyboard. So when you want to see them you will move your eyeballs down, and when you are done, you will move them up again. The problem is two-fold. At the one hand you will lose precious time looking up, down and up again. On the other hand, you will probably lose in any game you are playing. The only conclusion you can get is this: you are not a gamer.



I did the math and science, and I could find only one conclusion:

Dot matrix displays on keyboards are waste of money. (Pretty obvious now huh? Of course it is, now that you have a proof before your eyes)


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