I don’t think people really buy prebuilt desktop computers anymore, but back in my
day, they used to come with basic peripherals like keyboards and mice.
Today, we’re looking at one such keyboard, the Acer SK-9625.
When we got it, I must have been in middle school, and my brother in elementary.
We thought it was the coolest thing.
Looking sleek with it’s thin overall height, glossy black accents, and that super cool
volume wheel.
All around the board follows a theme of what futuristic meant to us about ten years ago.
Every design element promotes thinness.
Compared to a regular mechanical keyboard, this is about half the height, so it is definitely
pretty thin, but when compared to something like Apple’s aluminum keyboard, it’s still
pretty thick.
So in order to minimize the visual height, they pulled off a couple tricks.
The first is that sweeping curve from the front face down to the resting surface.
With this, they’re able to hide the height of the front lip when it’s sitting in front
of the user.
The next is the use of this two-part design in the top face.
The glossy area where the media keys rest is slightly depressed from the top, which
is also flush with the tops of these buttons.
To the right of this area is the large blank space on the matte black portion whose thickness
is obvious to the user.
The suggestion here is that the entire keyboard is only really as thick as two of these pieces,
when in reality it’s more like 10 of them.
Finally, the biggest trick thinning down the SK-9625 are the keycaps.
They protrude only minimally from the top surface, and only do so with a fairly gradual
slope up to the plateau.
All of these elements combined work fairly effectively in giving the board a slim appearance.
Another major theme of this board is the fact that it follows something that resembles modern
Gamer design language but in a sedated and rounded way.
One example is again the top glossy bezel.
This acts as an accent piece, and when paired with the matte black protrusion, sort of a
gamery edgy look is created.
Additionally, the volume wheel on the right rear corner is pretty gamer, especially with
that edgy “volume up” and “volume down” texts.
To be clear, the computer that this board accompanied was not at all for gaming, and
I don’t even think it was marketed as such.
So This may have just been the common design pattern at the time.
Leave a comment down below if you remember anything from this era.
As you get to looking at the sides, all of these illusions are broken with a super unimpressive
bottom shell.
On the bottom, there are only two rubber pads, old HHKB style, with two flip up feet.
You’ll also notice a bit of gamer gunk there.
When I take a step back for a moment and look at this keyboard outside of its context, I
think it’s actually pretty attractive.
The overall design is consistent and well executed.
This is a fullsize keyboard with a completely standard ANSI layout.
The only odd thing is that the function row is half height.
Not that it really matters at all, because these keycaps are proprietary mount, as cheap
rubber domes tend to be.
They appear to be ABS plastic with pad printed legends.
You can see that the WASD cluster legends have started wearing away.
The texture is pretty standard and there’s not much thickness to speak of.
You can disregard the bits of white all over.
That’s from the time when I spray painted my walls and forgot to put this away.
The board comes apart with 15 screws in the back, which reveals a very simple construction.
On top of the bottom shell rests the membrane layer and the associated electronics.
On top of that rests the sheet of rubber domes, and then the top housing, which contains the
barrels in which the keycaps go.
This is similar to how the HHKB does it.
Looking at the rubber domes first, we can see that there are actually a couple variations
found throughout the sheet.
Taking the domes used in the alphas as the standard, the ones found in the function row
are shaped differently.
The round bottom part is smaller, and the top stem part is longer.
This translates to a different keyfeel which we will get into later.
The domes for the media buttons are different still with the narrower base but also a shorter
stem.
Moving on to the top case, again, the construction is similar to an HHKB where the quote-on-quote
switch housing is integrated into it.
It differs here in that there is no separate plunger, but rather a keycap stem that presses
directly on the rubber domes.
The longer keys have wire stabilizers.
The wire clips into the keycap and it slides back and forth in the channels on the top
case.
The bottom and top halves by themselves are pretty flexible as expected since there are
no metal components, but when they’re put back together, it’s actually pretty stiff.
It’s a little weird to be evaluating the build quality of a board like this, but it’s
pretty standard for something of this range.
I’ve opened up other cheap rubber domes before and it was similar.
In the age of laptop keyboards, it’s not out of the question that we’ve forgotten
what regular rubber domes feel like.
To be fair, this is on the slim side with a reduced travel that looks to be about 2
mm or so, but I think we’ll be able to derive the spirit of the rubber dome.
The domes are nicely tactile, definitely more than something like Cherry Browns, and the
added travel is definitely much appreciated.
The function row with its different domes are noticeably more tactile, and has slightly
reduced travel distance.
The intent might have been to make these feel more important or something.
It’s pretty interesting to me that even for a mass produced cheap product like this,
different feel for different keys were considered.
One thing that stands out is that off center keypresses sometimes bind, which is definitely
very distracting.
From the same underlying issue, the keypress can be a little rough but in a squeaky way.
Like if you were rubbing two inflated balloons together.
The stabilized keys are actually better in this regard, but unsurprisingly have the rattling
issue.
On the topic of sound, this is similar to Topre, which makes a lot of sense since they’re
pretty much the same things.
The key upstroke has quite a bit of rattle, while the bottom out is muted by the dome
sheet.
Because the case is so unsubstantial, the pitch is definitely less full than something
like the FC660C, but it’s the same general sound.
The Acer SK-9625 is not really a keyboard that people are gonna look for.
This is more like a case study to act as a reminder for what we’re coming from, because
I’ve been in the opinion that people actually just like rubber domes and forgot about them
until they recently tried a Topre board.
I think oftentimes, there is not really a need to go for Topre, when you can spend 10
dollars on Ebay for some no-name full travel rubber dome.
In a pursuit to demonstrate this point, I’m going to give this a good clean and lube it
so we can see if you can DIY something similar to a topre board.
I might be proven wrong, but I have high hopes.