The lovely people at Epomaker were good enough to send me one of their new HS84 keyboards to try out.
The HS84 is an 84 key / 80% compact layout (meaning that all the keys, including the arrow keys, Home, etc are all spaced the same) wired (standard USB C to USB A) keyboard.
Because the HS84 has 84 keys you get all your F-keys (which I’m not used to having these days) which double up as media keys, which is never a bad thing.
It comes with a choice of Gateron Brown, Blue, Black, Red, or Yellow switches. I got the Browns and they are absolutely perfect. Genuinely some of the nicest I’ve ever typed on. I usually write on Cherry MX Silent Reds, but I might even like the Gateron Browns better.
If you’re not as happy with the switches though, the HS84 is hot-swappable, meaning you can swap out any switches for your own personal preference with no need for soldering.
The HS84 comes with white ABS double-shot keycaps with transparent characters. The transparency is important because it really, really works fantastically with the keyboard’s full-colour RGB backlights. Another thing that works brilliantly with the lights is the HS84’s frosted, translucent case, which has its own strip of lights running around its edge. Flip the keyboard over and the underside is pretty much transparent, reminding me of Clear Craze tech of the 1990s (in absolutely the best possible way).
If you’ve read my reviews before you’ll know that whilst I appreciate a good, crazy light show as much as the next person, I generally switch to a solid colour pretty much straight away when I’m using a backlit keyboard. That’s not been the case with the HS84, however. The combination of the transparency with the full-colour RBG lights and some really cool (and quite subtle) preset lighting settings and effects really works fantastically well. My favourite by far is the Single Key Light Up Mode where each key you press fades through three or four other colours before switching off again. I usually find reactive light effects a bit pointless and distracting but that’s definitely not the case here at all.
You can create, set, and store Macros, and you can customise all the onboard stuff via the downloadable software (yes, I don’t really know what I’m talking about here and generally steer clear of this stuff, but you probably know better than me).
Out of the box, I admit that I wasn’t really expecting the HS84 to be a keyboard for me. I assumed it was going to be a flashy, gaming-oriented board rather than something I’d want to work on every day, but I was completely wrong. I haven’t even been slightly tempted to switch to any other board for my desktop typing in the two weeks since it arrived and I plugged it in. I can’t really recommend it any more highly than that.