Corsair K63 Wireless
Flash keys with full freedom
Whoever came up with this grid, which squashes the left-hand functions slightly, yet stretches the main cluster about two thirds of an inch wider than any other standard keyboard, must be a little sadistic. You’ll spend at least your initial hours with the K63 fighting your muscle memory and mistyping.
That’s about the only big design mishap here, though. The keys — individually illuminated with blue LEDs, and glowing over a blue base plate — are bright and attractive, with a wide, bold font making the most of the above-switch lighting. The switches themselves are stock Cherry MX Reds, which (for our money) offer one of the best combinations of bite and low noise, though their actuation point is relatively deep, and they could be accused of being a little boring by extreme ’ boardists. We wouldn’t necessarily argue that fact.
You get extra buttons — media controls on the top-left; volume on the right — and a two-level brightness control for the lighting, as well as a Windows/context key lock. There’s a textured space bar, which is nice.
If you do care about your wrists, there’s a pretty lame hollow plastic palm rest included, which tapers to a point and can’t, despite its “soft touch” texturing, grip your skin in any meaningful way, leading to a particularly slippery typing experience. It does, though, clip on, which is handy when you consider the K63’s key feature: it’s wireless, either operating through Bluetooth or, preferably, through Corsair’s own encryptable 2.4GHz wireless protocol, which gives it a claimed 1ms response time. That is, just as with Logitech’s similarly responsive Lightspeed wireless connection, akin to wizardry, and had we not experienced a couple of odd dropouts (in an admittedly cloudy 2.4GHz environment), we’d have been as blown away as we were by its competitor; alas, any loss of signal, particularly one in close proximity to the USB receiver, is a mark down.
You can pair the K63 with a couple of devices at one time, switching instantly between Bluetooth and 2.4GHz using the underutilised Fn key, which is mercifully tucked in the right function lane, rather than pushing the left Ctrl key around. This keyboard also scrapes back a little of that lost goodwill by running perfectly well in wired mode, so if you’re after an additional degree of reliability (or even if the battery has just run dry and it needs to be recharged), you can keep typing as normal. That said, the charging circuit emits a barely noticeable highpitched whine, which may or may not irritate you in the same way as a lurking mosquito that you can hear but not locate, and even Corsair doesn’t quote the battery as running for longer than 15 hours, which isn’t impressive.
We don’t hate the K63. It’s a practical, well-built, and neat-looking keyboard, with perfectly decent switches. It’s wireless, and it even boasts full rollover and anti-ghosting. You can set up your own macros in software, and mess with the lights all you like. But it feels more like an interim attempt.