Performance

For testing, I swapped the MK Retro with my main keyboard and I have been typing on it for about three weeks. This includes a small amount of gaming and I’ve written multiple reviews including this one on the keyboard. This has given me time to get a good feel for the keyboard and to start to see if there are any initial quality issues or concerns with the unique design. First off, the keyboard design did have a little larger bezel and overall footprint when compared to my normal keyboard but it wasn’t so large that it was a problem at all. Getting started I immediately noticed that the typewriter style keycaps were going to take a little time to adjust to. They have a flat profile and that was a slight issue, but it's not the first time I’ve typed on a flat keycap profile. The design, however, has the tops of the keycaps closer to each other. That might sound weird, but if you were to look at the keycaps compared to any normal keycap, the top part of the key that you type on it larger on these. This is because most keycaps are wider at the bottom and get smaller towards the top, but this design doesn’t. My laptop is similar, but with that keyboard, they spaced the caps out more. The MK Retro, on the other hand, has the keys close together and I found myself fat fingering keys a lot for the first few weeks of use.

Once I got adjusted I was able to get a better feel for the unnamed green switches on the keyboard. As I mentioned before they are basically the same as a Cherry Blue so they are clicky and light to press. This isn’t my preferred switch type, but I do think it is the best fit for this specific keyboard. The unique keycap design, however, did seem to make things louder. I think this is because the caps are lighter in weight and they also don’t wrap around the switch down at the bottom so the noise gets out. This just added to the typewriter sound and feel. The cherry type stabilizers did a good job and didn’t seem to rattle or cause any issues in my testing. I was a little concerned that the cover plate might catch on the keycaps at times but that was never an issue as well. In fact, the MK Retro types very smooth.

I think I would have preferred the MK Retro more if I could have angled the keyboard up and they did design it to do that but one of the two feet on our sample was broken. This does give me concerns over the build quality, but one keyboard out of who knows how many doesn’t necessarily mean anything, we will just need to keep an eye out on other users experience. That said I did have a big issue with the legends on the keycaps being pad printed. When I first took a look at the keyboard I was a little worried about pad printing and ABS caps causing issues in the future, but I would never have expected to see multiple legends starting to wear off after just three weeks of testing. At first, I thought they might just be dirty, but after trying to clean them it was clear that they were already thin enough that the black was showing through. Hopefully, Azio gets that issue corrected.