Hello all.
Yes, you are not seeing things. Your screen does not need to be adjusted. Yes … this is a review for the Leopold FC660
M . You may be wondering, why is it not a FC660C? Why no topRAH? Well … the easiest way to put it is … EK is out of the FC660C, I didn’t feel like lurking Classifieds for one and I got curious regarding the Cherry MX version. If only I waited a few days, I would’ve ordered one through qtan instead of proxy-ing one through Bhiner. I know there have been a few reviews over at KBDMania, but I felt it wouldn’t hurt to see one in English. Anyways … here we go.
Unlike the FC660C, the box for the FC660M is quite plain. It reminds me of the box for the FC200R. Bhiner decided to wrap it in yellow tape for some odd reason, so bear with me and the pictures. I managed to peel off the tape on the label. For those who want to know, the 5 little boxes on the bottom right of the label are for switch choice. The 2nd from the left is for White shaft, or MX Clears, for those not in Asia. The mini USB port is on the top right side of the keyboard.
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The keyboard itself didn’t come with a plastic cover like TKL or full sized boards. It comes wrapped in plastic. The FC660M comes with the usual USB to mini USB cable, the manual to show what the dipswitch disables/enables, and extra PBT keycaps. It would’ve been nice to get thick keycaps, but I guess you can't have it all.
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I tried to do my best to get a shot of the profile of the PBT keycaps that came with the board. The keycap in the far back is OEM profile, followed by the FC660M keycap, GMK, and IMSTO thick. The profile for the 660M is slightly taller than cherry profile. It reminds me a bit of SP’s profile.
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Now on to what everybody wants to know: Did Leopold use its own random spacebar? The answer … They sure did. While the EK Universal spacebar comes really close, it’s not close enough.
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Mechanical keyboards are like Barbie dolls. We like to dress them up. Don’t deny it
. Here is the FC660M with IMSTO thick PBT with Hangul. If you have another 2.25x Shift key to match your set, you can make it work. The 1x Windows key is sandwiched between a 1.25x Control and Alt key. The Alt, Control and FN key are 1.25x as well. The spacebar is 6.25x. In the picture, you can tell that the spacebar is just sitting on the switch stem. I’ll probably harvest some stems off some spare keycaps and epoxy putty them onto a spacebar to make it fit.
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Overall Impression I enjoy stock Cherry MX Clears so it didn’t take long to start typing away. The switches are plate mounted and as usual the plate gives the board that heft when carried. The stabilizers are Cherry plate mounted, like all Leopolds. The layout is starting to grow on me. While I do believe the Insert and Delete keys look out of place, you get to appreciate the Delete key instead of hitting FN Backspace like on the Poker. So far the only thing that has bugged me is the stock keycaps. The print already looked like they were fading once sunlight hit it when I removed the keyboard of the box. The tops of the keycaps are quite flat as well. Aside from the usual gripe of the non-standard spacebar, the FC660M is quite a nice 60%-ish (66% I guess) keyboard. I will probably take it apart later on to check out of the controller and see why there are notches/spaces near some of the switches. The plate is not a phantom plate per-say, but it got me curious as to why there are holes in certain places.
Hopefully this brief review can help other decide whether or not they want to purchase an FC660M. Thanks for reading guys.