Hello, this is The Provoked
Prawn, and this is the Roccat Magma, affordable membrane style keyboard from Roccat which focuses
on RGB backlighting, and as you can see, the result of that is a particularly nice
looking keyboard, which comes in at a very affordable 49 pounds sterling and around $59,
which is very reasonable for what you're getting. And I'm actually really surprised
by that price because I didn't look at the price until I'd finished the review,
and was ready to talk to you about what it's like to use. Now this is an unboxing video,
and a review. I've been using it for just under two weeks now, I want to talk to you about what
the quality of this is like, the downsides of it that I can potentially, see some minor
niggles and annoyances, I'll go into the software a bit later on, but also just to talk about the
highlights of it. Now as you can see from the box, and from the initial shots from this video it is
a really nice looking keyboard for the amount of money you're paying you're getting a very
nice keyboard with a membrane style design, which means it's quieter than most of your standard
mechanical keyboards. And yet it's designed for competitive gamers. And that's what they say,
with it, anti ghosting technology designed to register your key presses and deliver some
good action. Now I've been using this for working throughout the day, gaming and for video editing,
and I found it to be actually a very delightful device to use, It's been pretty nice, it does the
job, it's comfortable on the fingertips, and it looks the business too. There are
some annoyances in terms of the design, and I'll talk to you about those as we go through.
But for the most part, it's actually a very nice keyboard, very affordable, and well thought out.
It comes with this wrist rest, which is detachable. And it's a little bit
intriguing as well. Cuz when you get out of the box has these rigid lines on it, they look
like they're going to be super uncomfortable but when you start using them it's actually
not too bad. That has the Roccat logo in the bottom right hand corner, obviously.
And the main thing that sort of shines is that backplate. So there's this semi transparent
top plate to it that allows the RGB light to come through, that obviously doesn't really
shine until you turn it on. The interesting thing about the wrist rest is it's also detachable,
but you have to sort of bend it round in order to take it off, which is quite interesting,
there's a little instruction in the box to tell you how to do that so you don't pull it
off and break the little catches and then ruin the wrist rest. But as I said this is actually
surprisingly comfortable for what it is because it's not padded in any way. It's plastic,
is ridged, it looks like it's going to be super uncomfortable, when you start using it, it's all
right. But what you will notice is that ridging effect, there's a lot of it, and it runs onto
the keyboard proper as well. And when I started using it, I immediately noticed an issue with
that that I'll show you in a second. And there are some other things too, like the key cap design,
for example, which I'll cover in a minute as well. Now that ridged effect looks really nice.
And as I said, I thought initially it was going to be a bit rough in terms of the texture on it,
it looks quite angry, but it isn't that deep. And so you don't find that it's leaving marks
on your wrists, and it isn't necessarily uncomfortable. One thing that does happen,
I found quite quickly is that dust and bits get picked up by the keyboard, and they just sit on
that. And this is a shot from the last couple of days when I've been using it for quite a
while now. And you can see already it's picked up a lot of hairs and dust and things like that.
Yeah, I'm at my keyboard a lot and sometimes dust and stuff ends up there, I'm a filthy gamer,
what can I tell you, but you can see it sits on there. But it's easy enough to get off with just
a brush and dust it down. No problems that's gone on, it's looking clean again. So it's not
an issue. Also that raised keycap design and that backplate design means that it's pretty
easy to keep clean. And because it's a membrane style keyboard, the housing means that it sits
a little bit higher. And I'll show you what I mean about that in a second. But that essentially
means that this keyboard should actually be really easy to keep clean, bar that
wrist rest, because you can just lift it up, you can use some compressed air, give it a bash,
you can blow on it, you can really really easily clean between the key caps underneath the keycaps
and around that general area. Now I'm going to do a separate video with just the key sounds if you
want to hear what it sounds like. But I will also be quiet for a second so you can hear my typing.
What I found is that this is, as you'd expect, a very nice quiet keyboard that isn't picked up when
you're streaming for example. Now I've got a good mic setup. I didn't find that I was hearing the
key presses on the microphone when I was playing games with my friends, is not obnoxiously loud,
and that's the benefit of having a membrane style keyboard, it's really quiet but it's
also very comfortable. And it's easy to use, nice key presses throughout the day,
comfortable and responsive for that. And yet it's good enough for gaming as well.
Obviously, it doesn't have like a high end super fast actuation that you'd get on a mechanical
keyboard. It doesn't have that satisfying click that you'd get from them, but it still
has a brilliant setup. And it has anti ghosting technology, 26 key rollover, which means you
can press a mass of keys and it'll still register those key presses. And one of the things I really
like about Roccat's, hardware, and I've talked about this in the past in previous Roccat reviews,
is the easy shift technology, which is - I'll show you later on in this video. But it's essentially a
bit of software where you can add a secondary key press to any of the keys on the keyboard. So this
is a full size keyboard, but you can actually add secondary buttons into the layers as well.
So that's going to be really interesting and potentially very useful. Now here you can see
we're removing the key caps, they're easy enough to pull off, and you'll see the raised plastic
housing around them, these key caps have that long sort of neck on them, which means it sits inside
that housing. And the housing therefore is easier to keep clean than other mechanical keyboards.
And that is a great thing indeed, and much easier to have a clean keyboard on your desk at all
times. One of the things that I will point out I'm going to take a little bit of time to show off,
is I noticed that the lettering on the housing of the key switches isn't that fantastic. So the
etching on it from this angle actually looks really good. From a top down view. It looks
fantastic, the lighting shining through really well, you can see that transparent backplate
is letting a lot of light through, it looks great. It's got five zone RGB lighting, it's not per key
illumination by any means. But you have zones on there. And Roccet's AIMO intelligent lighting
is actually really nice, it's got some really nice glows on it. And this is under pretty
heavy lighting, but it's still glowing really nicely. And it goes really nice throughout the
day and into the night. One thing that I did notice is the lettering isn't as good if you're
sitting at your desk at the standard angle. So if you're sitting at your desk as you would be
in a chair with the keyboard in front of you, and you're looking down at it,
notice that the lettering is off, and the top of it is quite dark. And it's just the angle of
how the light shining through I think, and I'm trying to show off in these video clips but I
haven't actually managed to sort of replicate the view that I'm seeing. So it's quite difficult to
put across in video. But essentially what it means is, there's a light bottom half of the lettering
and then top half quite dark. Usually you see this effect on PBT double shot keycaps because
they're a bit thicker, but I think it's simply because of the way the RGB lighting's working on
this keyboard, because it's shining through that backplate, it isn't coming through individually
through each key cap and therefore it's not bright enough to shine through the lettering properly.
You can adjust the brightness quite easily with the function key and those directional
arrows as you can see. So you can turn it up and down. And there's some more lighting up on
the NumLock and the CapsLock up here. It's indicated with a white indicator,
which I'll be honest, I don't think is that nice. I think that kind of detracts from the look of it
a bit when it's turned on. Quite bright. Again, that's hard to do it justice here but with the
standard lighting on there you then have these garish, white lights lit up when that's turned on.
But it is nice to have an indicator when that's there. Another thing you'll see on the scroll
lock is you have the game mode, which obviously just disables annoying things like the Windows key
when you're playing. So what you can see the most part is a very nice keyboard for that
and I've really enjoyed using it and it's very nice looking and for the price is
actually very good. I'm trying to pick holes in what is a pretty fantastic keyboard for
the amount of money and the tiny little annoyances that I found a bit frustrating,
like the keyboard lettering, and another one that you might have spotted already
is the design of the keyboard. If you look here, where it says the Roccat Magma,
underneath the Page Down button, and down by the bottom of control, you can see some black
blobs on the keyboard. And I believe this is where the transparent housing is stuck
to the backplate. I guess it's some sort of plastic attachments below them.
What it results in is dark spots that you will spy all across the keyboard where the RGB lighting
isn't turned on properly, I can see it in several different places, it's really prominent underneath
Enter key, you can see it here, underneath page down as I said, it's under the function key, Ctrl
in a few different spots around there. And if you look too hard, you'll find multiple
zones where this sort of juts out and you have this black spot and I think that's a shame because
it detracts from the overall look, it would have been nice if they could have hidden it away
more under the key caps. But again, as I said, this is an affordable keyboard. So you
know, these are small problems in an otherwise fantastic bit of kit. And I've really enjoyed it,
I really like the RGB lighting on it. I'm a big fan of Roccet's RGB AIMO lighting, really
simple. What it does is it matches up with other devices here. So you can see the Roccat Kone Pro,
which I'll be reviewing shortly alongside that. And with that AIMO lighting it washes across
from the mouse to the keyboard and back and forth. And there's quite a really nice view with that.
Now I'm going to dive into the Swarm software and show you what you can do in there. So here we are
within Roccat Swarm software. And from within the Swarm software, you can control Roccat devices,
so you can see the Magma and the Prone here and you have A number of different things.
Now the Magma isn't incredibly feature rich, but it is possible to customize a number of different
sayings. This first one gives you access to basic settings like changing repeat delay, repeat rate,
cursor, blink rate and things like that. I haven't changed any of those. I like it as the standard
set up. You can also add a sound effect, so you can get some sound feedback when you pressing your
keys in your headset. So for example you can set a click sound [clicking sounds] so that when you're
typing, you're gonna hear that. Typewriter sound [typewriter keys sound]. Beam sound
[beam sound].
Sci-Fi sound [laser sounds]. Those things are kind of gimmicky. But they're there if you need
them. Now, the most interesting things for me are under key assignment and key illumination.
Now I said earlier, this keyword doesn't have per key RGB illumination, what it does have is five
different zones powered by 10 discrete LED that gives you that backlight effect and how it
gives you the most lighting is through the transparent housing behind the keycaps. And that's
how it all shines through. That is partly why you will see some dark patches on the lettering,
because there's not individual LEDs on each key and so it doesn't shine through particularly well
on some areas at certain angles. But that doesn't mean you don't get good lighting,
you can see the AIMO intelligent lighting system is the main default one that it's set to and this
is actually my favorite and always has been with Roccat products, some really good organic
lighting that basically changes as you're using it, and it changes through a nice wave of colors.
And it is one of the least obnoxious RGB lighting that I've seen. You can also select and go through
wave as a color, you can change the speed up and down on that, you can go to fully lit which I'll
come back to in a second, heartbeat where you can change to between different themes, you'll
see there are color themes, one has a gradient so you have red on one side, for example, orange on
the other, blue to white, things like that, you can apply each of these to the keyboard and get
those effects going across it, you have breathing, and you also have fade effects. But my favorite is
almost certainly the intelligent lighting with the fully lit one, you can not only select the theme,
but also customize each of the zones. So you could for example, set a number of different colors
to go across here until your heart's content, let's just really make something hideous for
now just to show you. And there you have a variety of different colors, I've nearly created,
like the Italian flag or something. But what I will say about this is the software doesn't really
show you what you're getting on the keyboard. Because what you get in the actual world is a
bit more washed than this is not quite as impressive as that it's not as vivid. And so I
do genuinely think that the intelligent lighting system is the best one to stick
for. Zone lighting is never particularly good, and I wasn't expecting the earth from this one
it doesn't deliver. The key assignment is the next interesting point. So with this keyboard,
you can reprogram most of the keys, and you'll be able to see when you click on them what you
can do with it, especially if you open up these sections here. So you can see
the variety of different options that are available. And you can choose from a number
of different things but I'm just going to show you and demonstrate somethings. So if you go
and click on these keys, you'll see which ones you can change. And what you'll notice is if I click
on these ones, if I click on "p", for example, you'll notice that there's now a no entry sign
on some of the key presses. So that means that I can't reprogram "p". So you can't reprogram
every key on the keyboard. But if it goes to "a" you'll see that it's opened up again. You'll also
see there is a game mode function down here on the bottom, and an easy shift function. The easy
shift function is one of the most interesting things about this keyboard and Roccat products
in general. Because that allows you to set a secondary action on that key. So what I'm going
to do is drag this assign hotkey down. And we're just going to say Ctrl and then Ctrl, Shift and V
which is paste without formatting, which [indecipherable] Windows shortcut, but I
wanted, wanted to be able to demonstrate how you do that. So that will now happen. Normally, it's
"A" but now when you press the easy shift button which is on the CapsLock key, that then opens
up the secondary action for "A" which in this case, will then do a paste without formatting but
you could change that to something else. So for example, I could press another hoy key,
and we could make that just our reload. And so with the CapsLock set to easy shift plus,
when you hold down the CapsLock, you can switch between these two modes. And you can customize it
to do that. Now, if you click on each of the keys, you'll see where the keys how-to actions are, you
have your standard action, you have as easy shift action. So you notice that some of them don't, for
example, this end of the keyboard, if you click on K, you can't add a secondary action, now you
only have one action, but you can remap the key, you can change it to be something else. So you
can set it up for that way. Now, one of the things I didn't mention earlier in video,
but you can see here, if you look is the function keys have media control keys built into
them. So rewind, stop, play, pause, skip forward, mute, volume up and volume down, if you click on
there you can see here, and you can see what the standard action is. And then what the secondary
action is. You can also, if you want to crazy, you could drag in that action and make it because what
you normally have to do is press the function key, and then press F5 in order to adjust the volume.
But if we wanted to make it so that's the volume down was just on F5 as default,
now we can do that, we can apply that. And now I don't have to press the function key to change
the volume anymore, it's just going to go up and down anyway. And you could do that with that key,
obviously, then you lose the F5 functionality on the keyboard. So maybe not ideal. But if you
set up different profiles for different things, you could switch between them, you could set so
you can switch profiles, so you'll see you have an option to have a different profile. So you
could set a button on the keyboard to change between profiles, then you could set it so that
you have media control easily. And if you need to get back to Windows or maybe even invert them
so that you have F5 as secondary functions if you need to press a button on your keyboard to
get to those actions. The possibilities are fairly endless. Obviously, you can't change the secondary
action on some of these keys. But you can remap a lot of them so you can change your keyboard to
do what you want it to. Doesn't seem to be a way to record a macro on this which is unfortunate,
but I suppose not surprising considering the price of it, but you can
remap and change a lot of keys which opens up a lot of possibilities
and rounds off of very nice keyboard. This has been The Provoked Prawn, hope you found this video
useful. Let me know in the comments if you've got any questions. Thanks for watching. This has
been The Provoked Prawn, hope you found this video useful, interesting, hilarious or otherwise. Take
a look at these other videos that I think you might find interesting as well, and have a look
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