I was thinking of buying me my very first real keyboard with mechanical switches. As I live in Finland and the shipping costs from the US are pretty high, I am leaning towards Das Keyboard III, which can be ordered from Germany (I think).
The Das III is indeed available from Germany. If you are a bit on the cheap side, you can get Cherry's G80-3000 for significantly less (I paid 45 Euros for mine); I don't know about the Das's build quality, but the G80-3000's is a bit underwhelming. The switches, however, are just as fine as on every other keyboard equipped with Cherry switches you can find. The G80-3000 is dead cheap as far as keyboards featuring mechanical switches go, so it's okay to sacrifice some build quality if you're willing to pay much less.
Now I have been reading this forum for a while, and I have been trying to learn about the different switches that are around. Initially I stumbled here by googling the IBM Model M when I was hunting more information about those buckling spring switches. And here I constantly see you people talking about those Cherry blue, brown and black switches.
I love the buckling springs; they're really loud and typing feel is
really good. But they're also quite hard to press. Cherry's blue MX are much lighter and the click is a bit disappointing when comparing it to the Model M's, but they're still much better than anything you could get with a rubber dome.
I know that Das has blue Cherry switches and from Cherry's datasheet I found out that blue switch is a click tactile switch. Brown on the other hand is soft tactile switch. So this is where my knowledge ends. I understood that they both have tactile feedback (as you can imagine), but are there any difference between blue and brown besides the noise?
You can find the different force vs. displacement graphs
here on page 5.
As you can see, there is quite a difference between those two and it's primarily a matter of taste as to what you prefer.
Take a look at the reviews of the Scorpius M10, Unicomp, Das Professional, and Filco (rough order of expense from cheapest to more expensive).
Alas, he lives in Europe, so the rough order is Cherry G80-3000, Das Professional, Scorpius M10, Unicomp, Filco with quite a gap between the Das and the Scorpius, as the latter is only available overseas.
If you have any PC recycling centers you may be able to find a IBM Clicky keyboard there (the staff may have a secret stash for themselves).
You might also want to try looking for Model Ms on ebay.
-huha