CM QuickFire Stealth (QFS) Deffective on arrival..............

[paco]

I purchased a brand new QuickFire Stealth, brown switches yesterday.
Arrive home. Try out every switch one by one.
The '9' doesn't work.

I mean... really?

How could this pass QA?

[berserkfan]

since you're in Canada, do you have some kind of return policy?

[dante]

Doesn't give me a warm and fuzzy about the inbound Novatouch...

[t2russo]

I purchased a brand new QuickFire Stealth, brown switches yesterday.
Arrive home. Try out every switch one by one.
The '9' doesn't work.

I mean... really?

How could this pass QA?

Arrive home?  In-store purchase or online?  I just love when people have some vague complaint yet offer zero circumstances around it.  Let us know! Details rock.

CM DEFINITELY had issues with the pre-stealth QFRs, browns especially (PCB traces around the left ALT cluster were totally boned and killed the keyboard, swapped two of my roommate's through RMA before we got it fixed).  Tell some more about this purchase so people can see what's going on.

[paco]

since you're in Canada, do you have some kind of return policy?

Yes. I actually returned the keyboard today. They tested it, realized the keyboard was faulty and gave back all my money. It only cost me car gas to go get the keyboard and bring it back.

Arrive home?  In-store purchase or online?  I just love when people have some vague complaint yet offer zero circumstances around it.  Let us know! Details rock.

CM DEFINITELY had issues with the pre-stealth QFRs, browns especially (PCB traces around the left ALT cluster were totally boned and killed the keyboard, swapped two of my roommate's through RMA before we got it fixed).  Tell some more about this purchase so people can see what's going on.

Saturday in the afternoon I went to a brick and mortar computer shop in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
They had multiple mechanical keyboards on display.
There was one CM QFS Brown box which I picked up.
I paid.
I got in my car.
I drove home.
I made myself a coffee.
I watched a National Geographic documentary about Incas giving their children as sacrifices to gods.
I then plugged the new keyboard on my main workstation.
Using the emacs *scratch* buffer, I typed all the keys of the keyboard. I do that with new keyboards to tell if a key is making a weird sound, is not well seated, or whatnot.
I realized the '9' key was not working.
I tried again by typing '7', '8', '9'. I would see '787878978'. So once in a while, the 9 would register, but most of the time, not.
Geek rage built up.
I fired up Firefox, went to http://geekhack.org, logged into my account and wrote the FP.
You wrote back saying you were not pleased.

[Rena]

Doesn't give me a warm and fuzzy about the inbound Novatouch...

This single situation, a relatively minor issue, certainly doesn't represent the entirety of Cooler Master's current quality control. This could happen with any keyboard company, and especially more so with others in comparison to CM's general good quality. To say something like this could represent the overall quality of the upcoming novatouch would be like dropping my eye liner in the toilet and calling it the BP spill.

Was just about to tell OP to contact cooler master but I noticed he already returned it anyway. Seems all is well. But did this happen to be a used keyboard?

[dante]

This single situation, a relatively minor issue, certainly doesn't represent the entirety of Cooler Master's current quality control.

There are many reviewers on Newegg and Amazon that would beg to differ.  A few of these DOA's are from Jan/Feb 2014.

[Rena]

This single situation, a relatively minor issue, certainly doesn't represent the entirety of Cooler Master's current quality control.

There are many reviewers on Newegg and Amazon that would beg to differ.  A few of these DOA's are from Jan/Feb 2014.

Oh really, I hadn't noticed

I always thought they were fine with that.

[wetto]

CM had an entire batch of CM Quick Fire Stealth units with problems with the soldering and yes, most of the blame goes to Costar, but CM needs to take responsibility as well. It was a batch of around 150 CM Quick Fire Stealths with MX Brown on which the entire area around the backspace key had bad soldering.

They pulled many of them out of the market before it became something even bigger, but it seems a few units are still out there, but yes, they already assumed the error and already took several actions to fix it.

Another problem that occurred during the same time-frame was that a batch of 200 units of ABNT2 (Brazilian Portuguese) layout CM Quick Fire Stealth keyboards had a wrong enter keycap (CM Brazil had to send the correct keycap to everyone who bought it):



In any case, the only way to fix this problem is to contact Cooler Master's support, they should already be aware of the problem.

And anyways, the quality of Cooler Master products varies a lot since they're using multiple OEMs. Costar (Rapid, Stealth, XT, Trigger) is nice and they know how to get the job done when they want to, but when they **** something up, you get an entire batch of faulty units, plus they're slow and expensive. Also, they're only a middle man, they're only as good as the factory they end up choosing. Not like everyone will use the same factory as FILCO or the one used for Ducky Shine II and III.

Solid Year (Rapid-I, Mech, TK) on the other hand is quite fast and cheaper, their soldering is really nice but their keycaps just aren't good at all and they're partly to blame for the Logitech G710+ fiasco too.

iOne (CM Quick Fire Pro, CM Storm Trigger Z) "supposedly" has the "lowest return rate" (though I'm not really sure about that), but their reputation is terrible and the fact that Solid Year has overrun them isn't something that surprises me.

But in the end, it's not always about the OEM, the company needs to keep an eye over them and control what they're doing and yes, that's part of what Quality Control is and something many companies are lacking nowadays.

[Roibhilin]

Carter pls