As some of you may know, I've been a big advocate for the Noppoo choc mini for a really long time, it's my personal keyboard of choice and it dawned on my that I haven't ever really done a review on the keyboard, I've done reviews on the Keycool 84, the HHKB Pro 2, the KUL, but never the Noppoo choc mini, so without further ado, here it is. Table of contents:
1. Overview of the keyboard
2. Advantages/Disadvantages
3. New vs Older models
4. Conclusion
5. Images
1. Overview of the keyboardThe Noppoo choc mini is a 75% board that comes with Red, Blue, Brown and Black MX Cherry Switches. The Choc mini has been out for some time now, I first got my iteration of the keyboard a good year or two ago now, I saw it on a streamers stream over on Twitch and I just had to have the board, I was using a Razer Blackwidow Elite at the time.
A lot of people do not enjoy the aesthetic of the NCM but personally? I absolutely love it, I have tried countless times to switch away from the keyboard, but something always keeps me coming back to the board and I think that shows either how addicted I am to 75% or how amazing Noppoo actually are.
The latest iteration that I received is quite sturdy, feels nice and looks nice, a few keys have changed, e.g. the win key now actually has an icon of the windows key and not the 'win' text anymore. It feels more of a complete keyboard now, it feels as if it's got some production value behind it, whereas before? It just felt like it was rather cheap. The keyboard still uses POM keycaps which remain my favourite keycap to date, I just find them more appealing over PBT and ABS, POM is just the perfect combination in my opinion, they take a lot longer to shine, have the durability of PBT, what more could you ask for?
2. Advantages and DisadvantagesAdvantages:
- The keyboard is lightweight and compact
- Niche product
- Supports most wanted keyswitches, red, black, blue and brown
- POM keycaps
- Sturdy plastic (little to no flex on the board)
- Very clean design
- Has nice functions on the board (e.g. ctrl to cap)
- Media functionality and other fn functions, (refer to here: https://kanyid.org/2014-08/noppoo-guide.html for a full guided list)
Disadvantages:- The front/side print erodes away very quickly
- Typos are a frequent occurrence because of how light the board feels while typing (on reds i'm referring to here)
- NCM's are known to be faulty and break at very early stages in their life cycle
- Chattering issues are very common within NCM's
- Reds on a NCM does not feel like reds on a KUL for example
- Harder to get hold of nowadays, especially from good retailers (I had to wait 2 months to get one off the retailer I wanted)
So I guess to summarise this section, are NCM's worth buying nowadays? To be honest, I can't even answer this question anymore as I am somewhat biased, but to be honest, I don't think the price point can be justified anymore with the fact that a lot of Noppoo Choc Mini's don't even make it past the 6-month mark anymore and that's really sad, I made an oath with myself that this will be the last NCM that I ever buy, after this I will be reverting to my KUL ES-87, it's just not worth it anymore and although $115 - $130 every 6 months isn't exactly a lot of money, that money could be going on something else for your computer or whatever.
3. Newer vs Older ModelsI bought 1 model in December 2013 and I bought another model exactly one year later, now the model that I got this year, looked a bit different, I'm not sure why, it just looked better, it felt better and I'm not sure why that is, maybe it was because of the fact that it was a brand new keyboard and newer keyboards do usually give off that 'it feels better' vibe or whatever, but in essence, the inside of the keyboard is exactly the same, the outside is exactly the same with just the windows key looking differently.
The newer model's key printing does seem to last a little bit longer, so it has that in it's favour, but apart from that, there is literally no differences what so ever and you are still getting the same keyboard as before.
Thus far I've not really noticed any chattering issues, so that is a good sign, I have accidentally pressed the same key twice or when I was typing something, another key would get inserted there accidentally due to the nature of the keyboard, the keys are very light and sometimes you do not even notice that they are being pressed accidentally, but I know for a fact that if I were using MX Browns/Blues, this would not be the case and I wouldn't have even noticed any of those accidental key-presses.
4. ConclusionI still think that the Noppoo choc mini is the absolute top dog in regards to 75% keyboards, I personally don't believe that there is a better keyboard out there for this particular form factor, I even think that it dominates 90% of the 60% sub-section with the exception of the HHKB Pro2 (That is probably the best 60% board ever made, pity they don't do reds. /sadface).
But although that is my firm opinion, I still cannot really condone others to actively go out and buy this keyboard over other keyboards that are known to be more reliable, less faulty and just have generally higher Quality Assurance. One of the main factors is that a lot of NCM users still use some of the first iterations of the keyboard, the one that looks like the following (located below, see fig. 1) and these versions of the keyboard are known to be very high quality and the failure rate is no where near as high as they are now, so I'm not entirely sure what has changed or why, but Noppoo really need to go back to their roots and bring the older version of the keyboard back as I personally believe that Noppoo are doing more harm than good these days due to the lack of quality assurance surrounding the Noppoo Choc Mini.
fig. 1
Overall: 7/105. ScreenshotsComing soon.
