now hear me out if i told you that one of my favorite keyboards isn't mechanical would i be a
heathen well howdy hey certified heathen hippotech here coming at you with a very interesting video
today i'm going to be taking a look at the nizduo 82 which is a prototype electrocapacitive board
that's pretty cool right it's not mechanical wow if you don't know what that is don't worry you're
in a good place i've been using the nisplum 87 as one of my daily drivers for months now
but will the niz duo stand up or is it gonna fall to some of its squishy little issues stick
around and you'll find out hypio from the yellow void here i'm stuck here and the only way to get
me out is by hitting subscribe so do that please there's a little bit of a story behind this video
i saw that this board was announced on geek and i really really wanted to try it out so i reached
out to niz and they sent me out a prototype for review now this board is definitely a prototype
and has quite a few issues that i'll be sure to be pointing out don't worry about that this
also means that i'm not entirely sure what all will actually come with the board and that type
of stuff so this is more of a first impressions rather than a full review the board was shipped in
a pretty hefty box and came in this carrying case with just some foam protecting the board i reckon
it might have been jostled pretty hard in shipping as some of the domes were actuating improperly and
i had to run some stuff to fix it anyways this carrying case is pretty nice and if it does come
with the board that's a good perk i haven't seen any word on accessories like cables or anything so
can assume that they might not come with it anyways let's move on to the actual board eh
yeah this here's a 75 keyboard which best layout by the way fight me i dare you uh fight me in
the comment section not in real life thank you the price will be somewhere around 300 to 350
for the aluminum versions but as you can see here i have the polycarbonate version
i gotta say i'm honestly not very stoked to get the polycarbonate version and i was hoping for
the aluminum white version because i think that looks way cooler i have a love hate relationship
with polycarbonate i think it makes things sound thockier but i don't like the look of it
the board will probably be coming in five different colors and possibly two different
versions i have the updated prototype here which features an aluminum weight but i think there's
also a brass version as well this weight is painted yellow and i don't like yellow very much
there's a ton of different color options for the weight though so that won't be too big of an issue
the final version will also have bluetooth support but i get a little button that doesn't
work yet so i can't really provide any ideas on whether or not the bluetooth is good or how
that performs battery life wise if you want to see all the customization options i recommend
checking out their geek post as they've got it all listed there the back of this board
is pretty striking but i gotta say it kinda gets lost in the polycarbonate it's got chunky bezels
which i do like and it also has rubber feet which are dummy thick and absorb quite a lot of shock
as far as the actual design of the board goes i think it's pretty nice and apparently it's based
on some game system or something i also really like this addition of what i call a handle but
it's really just a nice cutout that lets you move it around on your desk easily this is a top
mounted board with an fr4 plate the flexibility is best described as someone that's been doing
yoga for a couple months like it's there but you know oh we're going back to the knock test
they make pretty good use of space so no hollowness here oh mr coffee skill everybody say
hello so many returning characters in this episode we got the knocks and the coffee scale so i got a
lot of requests to check out the stabilizers and this board does come with either cherry plate
mounts or co-star stabs these stabilizers were shockingly good so much so that i'm not sure if
they lubed them specifically for me so take this with a grain of salt as far as housing rattle
there was virtually none so no band-aid mod needed here which is pretty good and i'll do a full
stabilizer sound test in a little bit so wait wait for that wait for that overall very little rattle
so this here is the secret of the board and it's an electric capacitive switch to simplify
it there's a rubber dome under the slider and when you press down it makes a little electric contact
or something it's pretty cool this means yes the board is not mechanical this was not clickbait
so this board comes with 35 gram rubber domes and a lot of people might think wow those are really
really light and yeah i agree they're really really light i get sore fingers from rock climbing
so typing on a board this light feels really really good to me that's why i kinda swapped
over and started using it more the best way to describe these domes are lightly tactile but kinda
punchy it's really something you gotta try and it definitely grows on you but i've started to really
really like rubber domes on keyboards some of you might have heard of topra or realforce boards and
this is nizz's take on that one of the really cool features that supports any mx stem style keycap
meaning you could use your favorite gmk set essay set whatever speaking of keycaps though
let's talk about these keycaps so unlike some of new's other boards these are dye sub pbt keycaps
and i'm hoping that these are prototypes because the keycap quality themselves are pretty bad
the legends are quite fuzzy and the keycaps had a lot of defects on the right you can see
the nisplum 87 which had double shot pbt keycaps that i thought were fantastic personally i'd like
to see niz go back to the double shot pbt keycaps but these are good in that they have front-facing
legends for any of the macro keys that are in the layers kind of like stop signs i think these are a
bit of an eyesore but maybe someone will find them useful anyways let me just use my wow stick wow
link in the description to disassemble this board i was going to go to town on this board and modder
up use it as my daily driver but i found some issues which we'll talk about in just a second
next i remove the ribbon cables and set the top to the side which revealed the usb-c daughter
board pretty nice now i'm assuming this pcb isn't final as it's supposed to have bluetooth
connections on it and a battery somewhere in this case if you've never seen an electric capacitive
keyboard before the pcb is pretty interesting and i'll definitely be taking one apart to mod pretty
soon in the future now a major issue i had with this prototype is that i couldn't get the pcb
fully out because the screws on the back were stripped i could probably get those
screws out but i didn't want to break it before i finished my review so i'll worry about that later
now if you're one of the big rubber dome gang people i've been informed that niz has not
changed how they do their rubber domes so they still put them in one big sheet so swapping out
individual domes will be very difficult as they don't have guides or anything for them
if you want to see a live stream or something of me taking this board apart and really going for it
then make sure you get subscribed i might do that later but right now i'd say the mod ability is
uh meh at least for this board i hope they don't have strip screws on the final versions
speaking of customizability let's talk about the software on the 87 i had some issues getting the
software working properly but they already had firmware available for the 82 and it worked
perfectly you can customize whatever keys and it's a similar experience to via albeit quite a bit
clunkier if you do a lot of productivity stuff and you want to reprogram keys and all of that
then it's very helpful there's also macros but i'm not quite sure how to get those set up so you
might have to look into that a little bit and next let me give you a sound test of those stabilizers
so yeah the stabilizers are cherry plate mount and they are impressively good
i'd say they're really well tuned and the only issue i had is with the left side of the space bar
which could be fixed pretty easy with a syringe and some permatex so final thoughts on the board
first let's start with sound i think overall the sound is pretty good and i think it sounds
decently more resonant and thockier than the other niz board that i've had based on my experience
with sound profiles i imagine the aluminum version would sound just a little bit sharper
overall though it's like tickling a marshmallow kinda nice the build quality is overall fine but
it's definitely a prototype and i'd like to see some things improved like this gap between the
polycarbonate layers going back to the keycaps if those are included with the final version i'd
like to see some improvement on those as well now in the market of electrocapacitive keyboards 300
is actually relatively cheap which is kind of sad this board definitely brings some creative design
to the space and you can definitely correct me in the comments but i think this is one of two 75
percents that you can get with electric capacitive switches so for that reason if you're looking for
a 75 that's electrocapacitive this might be your best bet even with some of the shortcomings that i
mentioned before now you're probably wondering will you be daily driving this hipio and
potentially actually now despite thinking that the board is a little bit tacky because the
polycarbonate case the switches are still really really solid and the stabilizers are good too
and honestly for switches this light the typing experience is really hard to beat so for that
reason it might secure a spot at least in my daily rotation maybe knocking out the other niz
board that i had in there i guess but i will say not having the features like bluetooth and stuff
definitely sucks for the prototype anyways i'll be leaving y'all with the sound test of the board
please watch the whole thing to support my youtube algorithm overlords also if you like
this video remember to give it a like and please hit subscribe thank you josh curb board platyplat
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