Every week I see another gorgeous set of abs keycaps for a decent price and say to myself, "If those were thick pbt I'd buy them."
Are Pbt keycaps manufacturers disinterested? Is the market too small? Are they margins too slim?
What's the poop?
You want thick PBT without raised legends? Have to be dyesubbed. Want lighter legends than the keycap plastic? Can't be dyesubbed.
Doubleshotting PBT results in all kinds of quality control issues. The main one is colour bleed, but you also have thermal contraction issues which can cause warping and pulling away. So thick PBT is most often single shot and dyesubbed. For dyesubbing you can only dye a darker colour onto a lighter one, so you can't have lighter legends than the base material.
I believe even the Vortex sets exhibit some colour bleed and this is the reason the "better" companies don't do it, except for small batches of keys (since they have better control of quality then, SP make some doubleshot arrow key sets). They won't release keycaps of poor overall quality.
PBT requires slower cooling time to prevent warping and therefore different molds to ABS, so that factors into the cost of sets, too.
Most of the "gorgeous set of abs keycaps for a decent price" are doubleshot ABS with light coloured legends, right? (Dolch, Green Tea, PuLSE, Nuclear Green, Tocix, etc)
