Hey there, recently got a set of IFK (Infinikey) Pastel for my Prime-e and wanted to share some of my findings. I'm a pretty big PBT fan, owning a set from likely every manu (except OG Cherry) and this was my first set from them other than Sanctuary Rebirth when I ended up selling because I wasn't too huge of a fan of the colors, so I didn't end up looking to closely at it. I'm a believer that reverse-dyesub can be super tricky and that nobody has perfected it yet, so I wanted to delve into a regularly dyesubbed keyset from Infinikey. To preface, all of my photos were taken at my desk using natural lighting from a window behind it. This is gonna be quite a long post, and I don't think I'll provide a tl;dr, but I would be very appreciative if you could read this whole post.
Background: First of all, IFK is proven to be manufactured by a company that goes by "winmix", and they are known to make some cheap quality pbt caps that you would often see on Chinese markets (
Here, and
here are examples of Winmix's work.) This is proven by
this post. I don't really have much more to say about this, but the quality of these caps are indictive of a cheap manufacturer. TKC did create new cherry molds for them however from what I understand, but whether this is a full rework or just additions to accommodate 40's was a mystery until now.
Texture & Keycaps: These feel much more chalky than most other PBT sets I have used. R2 CRP being the smoothest while Leopold having the most texture, IFK has almost no texture but the surface is not smooth whatsoever. I could compare it to dry untextured paint on a wall. I find this personally not satisfying, as the smoothness or textured caps are pleasant on my fingers rather than rubbing something that feels extremely dry. I would consider this poor quality plastic. The homing bars are so small they may as well not exist.
Here is an example next to HK Gaming. This also brings me to the keycaps themselves, notice the height next to HK gaming which is actually cherry height. IFK is a bit taller than actual cherry, leading me to believe that TKC did pay for entirely new molds altogether. I haven't found much in terms of crooked stems, which CRP is notorious for, other than
this slight crookedness on the /? key. I should mention that I also got two convex 2.25u keys for spacebars, and two regular 2u's. I don't know if this is intentional, but any board with split spacebars won't be matching because of this.
Legends: These are by far the biggest offender when it comes to regular dyesub. I really wish I got some BoW caps as well to compare to the other black legends sets I have, but for now I'm so massively disappointed that I wanted to write this up.
From left to right, IFK, HK Gaming, EPBT. These legends are simply just far too splotchy. There are too many white spots within the legends and from reasonable distance they appear super fuzzy.
Here is the esc key. These just appear far too fuzzy from a reasonable distance.
Here are some other regular dyesubbed keys. The legends on these are too squished together compared to the rest of the mods.
Here and
here are some examples of the reverse dyesub. These honestly have more clarity than the regular dyesub at typing distance, but the font suffers and shrinks because of the reverse dyesub process.
Reverse Dyesub: I mostly didn't expect to be blown away coming into this, and honestly it's slightly better than I thought it would be, tho they still suffer from being lighter on the bottom on the cap and forming some sort of gradient on the way up as seen
here. This has to be a limitation on the reverse dyesub process as a whole, as it is apparent with other manufacturers and profiles. I assume this is much more apparent in darker keys as seen on Graen.
Shot of keyboard and caps. Altogether, I'm extremely disappointed I paid $75 total and waited three weeks to get this in stock item. I don't think Infinikey quality is on par for the amount that they are charging, let alone half that price. They are running through GBs for sets running two a month to get these poor quality caps churned out, and it makes me sad it took me this long to get a critical eye on them. Infinikey Magical Girl is the most recent group buy to come from TheKeyCompany, and there is proof enough that they did not have to make new molds for that set, and can be assumed the same lack of quality will be put into that set as these other ones. Colors are not worth the dime you pay for a company calling this "cherry profile" and providing lackluster quality plastic and dyesubbing techniques.
Thanks for reading. If you have any questions or would like to provide further facts, don't hesitate to post.
