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Best rubber dome keyboard

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phinix:
What is the best rubber dome keyboard? (Please do not say Topre)
What is your experience and which one would you suggest?
Looking for a cheap full keyboard for office use.

Maledicted:

--- Quote from: phinix on Thu, 17 March 2022, 05:24:17 ---What is the best rubber dome keyboard? (Please do not say Topre)
What is your experience and which one would you suggest?
Looking for a cheap full keyboard for office use.

--- End quote ---

Packard Bell 5131cs are usually really cheap on Ebay. They have BTC dome with slider, which is pretty nice. I forget which other common/conventional brand of dome with sliders I liked offhand, but can check when I'm home (I'll leave out Fujitsu Peerless and Focus dome with slider).

There are a few modern Logitech boards in the lab at one of the schools in the district. I'm not sure if they're the best ever, but I would take them over literally anything MX. Logitech Deluxe 250, $14 on Ebay.

fohat.digs:
As for rubber domes without sliders, I have 3 favorites:
IBM 8923
Dell Quietkey (pre-Chinese specimens with discreet domes)
Compaq SK-2800 (that one had media buttons that I liked once upon a time)

HungerMechanic:
What does "best" even mean?

Are you looking for tactile, low-tactile, loud, quiet?

We went through a drought of good rubber-domes in the mid-2010s, maybe we still are.

Some people here have spoken highly of the Perixx Periboards. Haven't used any that I liked. There's one chunky rubber-dome they make that's said to feel like MX Brown(!)

The Kensington Keyboard for Life, at least of pre-pandemic manufacture, was an affordable and restrained board that usually had good durability. Low-tactility, the opposite of a BTC-5100.

External Thinkpad USB keyboards are rubber-dome. Should use the same good mechanism as the laptops, although not in the awesome CF roll-cage that makes the X1 Carbon keyboard so good.

I don't know of any other decent rubber-domes, though. Maybe others can help?

If you're willing to go scissor-switch, people speak highly of the Logitech Perfectstroke keyboards. There's an entry on Deskthority Wiki about them. The old ones were the real thing. But the modern ones (e.g. Logitech MX Keys) have a fan base, the MX Keys is sought-after.

Anyways, the Kensington Keyboard for Life is a perfectly adequate office keyboard, and isn't that loud. The Logitech office keyboards using the Perfectstroke system are also probably good. On the more expensive [but not Topre] side, a full-size Niz keyboard is cheaper than Topre, and will sound better out-of-box. Not as tactile as Topre, but a 35-45 G Niz is in the range of most office rubber-domes.

MIGHTY CHICKEN:
In terms of rubber dome thock,

My preference would go out to an old apple magic keyboard, the silver-white ones with the scissor switches. Amazing things, just might have a weird winkey placement.

Otherwise logitech ones are pretty decent as previously mentioned, love the mx keys.

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