Ok so I got my set this morning. Here's a brief review/impressions. I'm not too experienced in the keyboard world - so take my words with a grain of salt.
First the good stuff:
- The keycaps themselves appear to be very good quality material wise (as is expected from ePBT).
- Legend quality seems to be good.
The bad stuff (see picture below for reference):
- The colour is not as white as I'd hoped. It's more of a light grey - I imagine it's similar to the alphas of GMK Muted (although I've never owned a set).
- Colour uniformity is quite variable in my opinion. In the photo I've attached, 'M' , 'Del', 'Pg Dn' are a tad bit whiter than some of the other 1u keys, and a lot whiter than the space bars. This isn't just how it looks in this picture/with this lighting. Quite disappointing.
- Packaging is poor - just a battered up plain cardboard box wrapped in bubble wrap (as is expected from ePBT).
So, in summary:
Considering the price - these cost ~80 USD if I remember correctly - I'd recommend them to people on a budget who don't want to pay the extra cash for a GMK set, or don't want to buy a GMK set for whatever other reason. I've never owned a GMK set (Modern Dolch is the first I've ordered), but I imagine you get what you pay for. From my experience with this set and previous ePBT sets (blanks), it seems that with ePBT you get bad packaging and less than ideal colour uniformity.
However, if you are like me and you'd rather spend a little bit extra for quality, I'd recommend you consider looking at alternatives. For people with high-end keyboards that want perfect-quality sets, this probably isn't for you. I decided to make the jump from the budget end of the hobby (my only keyboard is a Pok3r) to the "endgame" (Moon RAMA M60-A on the way), and I hoped that ePBT BoW would become my go-to classic white set for my M60-A - much like what I imagine GMK Stormtrooper to be (again, never owned a set). I think it probably won't be
If anybody is interested, my future keyboard plans are to sell my Pok3r once my M60-A arrives and be done with buying keyboards. I'll continue to experiment with keycaps, but I'll try and wait until GMK Modern Dolch arrives so that I can definitively decide whether to look to GMK or ePBT for my future purchases.