October Update(one day early)So we have good news and bad news.
The good news is that ZFrontier has started shipping to customers, and that Keyreative has reported that they've finished production!
The bad news is that ZFrontier has started shipping to customers
without letting me approve the kits first. I received photos of production samples for (nearly) every kit only about 24-48 hours ago, and I've spent a long time combing through them.
Overall, the quality looks good, but I have already identified six kits (out of the 39 I've seen) with errors. And because I've only seen top-down photos, I cannot properly confirm that every key is indeed printed to the correct row. I may find further errors as the days progress.
Additionally, because Keyreative would rather do a rush job rather than contact a designer or vendor, the packaging art was done
without my involvement or approval. I didn't hear about this until
after I submitted my own revised packaging design, at which point I discovered that they'd not only created their own packaging but had gone ahead and printed it. Completely and utterly annoying, and a totally avoidable issue, but this goes on the pile of "things I will complain about, but not high priority enough to demand change."
I have communicated the six kits with known errors to Keyreative and am waiting on a response. I have also asked for further photos of a few kits with nonstandard row assignments (Colemak, Dvorak, and a few others) to confirm that legend placement is indeed correct.
Some of the kitting errors may be due to keys being sorted incorrectly, so it's possible that some errors will not be consistent across an entire kit. One such error is the inclusion of French-language accented keys in kits that were specified as English-language legends.
SUMMARY OF KNOWN ISSUES:
- Keyreative will ship this set in unapproved packaging art. Highly unlikely to be corrected.
Russian Green TKL Mods kit contains French-language legend accent keys instead of their English-language counterparts.
10 October - Keyreative has supplied a photo of a corrected kit.Russian Green Ergo Mods kit contains one French-language novelty (Retirer instead of Retreat).
10 October - Keyreative has supplied a photo of a corrected kit.French Indigo Ortho kit is missing three keys.
10 October - Keyreative has supplied a photo of a corrected kit.Mac Kit has French/English legends backwards for the 1.5u Commande / Command keys.
04 October - Keyreative has supplied a photo of a corrected kit.Madness Kit currently includes scooped FJ and non-homing FJ; it should instead contain scooped and barred FJ keys.
04 October - Keyreative has supplied a photo of a corrected kit.Tamil Alphas Kit currently is missing its =+ key and includes the wrong mod-colored keys (legend centering inconsistent with other alphas in that kit).
10 October - Keyreative has supplied a photo of a corrected kit.
That all being said, here are some photos of what I think are good-looking keycaps.
Updated 10 OctoberI have received photos of corrections to all kit issues. The only remaining known issue is the incorrect artwork for the packaging which unfortunately won't be corrected.
