INTRODUCTION

   Back in the late 80's early 90's the consumer PC market was pretty much non-existent so gamers didn't really have gaming peripherals such as keyboards, mice and headsets to choose from (there hardly were any hardware components for us to begin with). There were quite a few low-cost membrane based keyboards in the market of course so whenever one happened to fail (surprisingly enough that didn't happen a lot) we could just go out and get a new one. Microsoft changed all that in the mid 90's with the much more durable natural line of membrane based keyboards (worth roughly 6-7 times more compared to a regular model) and the rest as they say is history. Today of course things have changed a lot and so thanks to the large number of keyboard manufacturers people have a vast number of models to choose from whether that's for gaming or professional use. Das Keyboard may not be well known for their mechanical gaming keyboards (their Division Zero line flew under the radar) but that's all about to change since they just released the 5Q and X50Q smart models both of which ended up in our lab roughly three weeks ago.

   Das Keyboard, a brand of Metadot, makes high-quality mechanical keyboards. The company is headquartered in Austin, Texas and is dedicated to delivering innovative technology products to increase productivity. Created in 2005, Das Keyboard has been praised by major media outlets, techie magazines, geeks and regular people who use and rely on keyboards to be productive throughout the workday. For more information, please visit www.daskeyboard.com.

   Since we received both the 5Q and X50Q together we were going to do a single review/comparison for both but in the end we decided to test them separately (more time with each keyboard means more extensive reviews) so today's review is about the X50Q model. Now although the X50Q is yet another mechanical keyboard our friends over at Das Keyboard seem to have outdone themselves at least on paper. So the brand new X50Q is equipped with several interesting features including the new Gamma Zulu mechanical switches manufactured by the Japanese OMRON (up to 100 million actuations/enhanced brightness mode/45 grams actuation force), RGB per-key backlight with 6 effects and 10 brightness levels, full N-KEY rollover (NKRO) with 100% anti-ghosting, dedicated media controls, aluminum top panel, detachable soft-touch wrist rest, 2 meter long braided cable and extra WASD textured keycaps. What really makes the X50Q unique however is the ability to pair internet connected devices with your keyboard which in turn can send color-coded Q smart notifications via IFTTT (If This Then That) and Zapier directly on its keys (by default Das Keyboard has 69 such notifications available - click here to see them all - but you can also add your very own). Of course the same alert system can be configured to notify you of new emails, CPU activity, weather forecasting, stock trends and more.