Tuesday 4 November 2008

Razer Tarantula gaming keyboard is a piece of shit.

I'm going to conclude my saga with the Razer Tarantula keyboard. I got mine finally replaced some time ago and it had the same problem as the previous one.

This isn't even the same batch of keyboards because firstly, the first keyboard was bought almost a year ago. The new one has a german layout and key lettering's so it cannot be the same batch. My only conclusion is that whole series of Razer Tarantula gaming keyboards is defective. And you read it here first folks.

So what did I do with the new keyboard? I'll tell you the truth. In all the rage about the repeating characters I wanted to narrow it down buy cutting the numeric pad off (like I did on the MS natural multimedia keyboard). That wasn't smartest thing to do and after the surgery some keys wouldn't work. Nah, I'm not bitter at all because the keyboard was a junk anyway. I do admit it was build very well and the keys had a good feel, but everything else was crap. The drivers sucked, macros sucked (can't press a macro key and any other key at the same time which is bullshit), that glowing logo which cannot be turned off sucked, usb sucked (ninetees called and they want ther usb 1.1 back), the price sucked, multimedia keys sucked (no pause button, only stop wtf) the widness sucked, and the most annoying off all which I never couldn't pass over was the problem of repeating characters when the keys are pressed.

So why nobody says a word about this problem? I think the problem number one is that people who buy this keyboard use it for gaming most or only for gaming. What I mean is that a teen kid who likes to play some game usually don't type much on the keyboard so he doesn't notice the defect the keyboard has.

So anyone wanting to buy a razer tarantula gaming keyboard (yes, I know I'm fishing for page rank) review the points I made in this text and the previous ones. I'll be short here. Don't buy that piece of garbage and go for some other keyboard. Preferably any other which isn't made by razer. I will never buy anything from razer again after this painful experience. If you need a gaming keyboard take a look at microsoft's sidewinder x6. What is good about this keyboard? Firstly it has a removable numeric pad so you can make the keyboard much shorter (on both or right side) which in an enormous plus in my book. Secondly it has good tactile feel (or so they say in the reviews, I need to test it first hand*). Thirdly, the chances are that it has the same problem as the razer are extremely small. The design is good, the knobs and extra buttons are good, dunno about the drivers but they seem better than razer's, and the price is the half of tarantula's etc.


*Funny how reviews can be deceptive. I read about a dozen of logitech's wave keyboard reviews and all of them said that the tactile feel was great. I almost bought that keyboard but I wanted to try it in store first. Let me be clear about it. The feel is horrible. You never know when you pressed the key because the keys have small resistance and no point when you can feel that your press was registered. So a quick tip about reviews: generally trust the reviews when they describe objective things, and generally distrust the reviews when then talk about subjective things like feel, looks etc. I know that this is pretty obvious but sometimes people just get carried away when shopping for item. To sum up: trust sentences like: X has object/feature Y. Distrust sentences like. Y feels great. You'll save a ton of cash just by following this simple and intuitive rules.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank god someone agrees with me.

Too late for me, thought. Need to try and take this kb back to the shop tomorrow.

Prosperous Poverty said...

Thanks for the comment. So you have the same problem I suppose? I just cannot believe that Razer doesn't get any flak for this. Their top of the line keyboard is defective (and I bet others are too) and you can conclusively read about it on very few places, if at all. But there certainly is a problem because on their webpage there is a question of repeating characters. They just dismiss it by saying that one should slow down keyboard repeat rate which firstly is a bullshit and secondly doesn't work because even then you get double characters which should be impossible.

Prosperous Poverty said...

And for anyone interested in the agony of servicing this keyboard under warranty
look this way.