I have been hearing people talk about how much they love Cherry dyesubs and dislike Imsto’s poorer quality dyesubs.
I’m wondering. Unicomp sells good quality dyesubs for a very affordable price. Their dyesubs are great for dying into other colors, if you’re into that. The only problem is that they are for buckling spring keyboards.
Why don’t we band together and talk to unicomp about making dyesubs that fit Cherry MX stems? It’s only a question of fitting the stem; it’s won’t raise any copyright or patent issues. It should be only a plastic-moulding issue. Even better, if they can make plastic adapters for MX keycaps (something like the bottom pieces in two-piece keycaps), then we will be able to use standard buckling spring dyesub keycaps on Cherry MX keyboards!
If someone takes my plastic adapter idea and runs with it, I think mkawa should be able make them on his 3D machine. From here, it should be a simple matter to contact some Chinese factory, get 100,000 made, and all geeks will be able to have cheap dyesub keycaps on their Cherry MX!
The same thing could probably be done with Topre keycaps, if you’re into that. Make a Topre adapter or bottom piece, and you will no longer be held hostage to Elitekeyboards’ pricing.
Another thing is that dyesub technology doesn’t require black legends. It only requires the legends to be darker than the underlying keycap. I see no reason why Unicomp can’t produce, say, dark blue dyesub letters on light gray keycaps. (They already do such things in their Limited Editions section on their website.) I think it is only a question of how many people we can get for a group buy.
