Logitech G610 Orion Brown

The keyboardiest keyboard you’ll ever keyboard on?

ORION BROWN is surely the alter ego of some DC superhero. Armed with a minimal set of powers and, inevitably, a skin-tight black catsuit, Cherry Girl fights crime in a city overrun by gigantic metal monsters capable of firing colored lasers everywhere they go.

Tortuous metaphors aside, what Logitech has produced here is a… keyboard. It’s black and rectangular, the keys sit on a choice of Cherry MX Red or Brown switches (ours has Browns, hence the name), rather than the home-made Romer Gs seen elsewhere in the range, and there's a couple of media keys at the top-right. This positions it squarely in the all-rounder bracket—the MX Brown switches having a click that gives feedback for gamers, as well as being perfectly comfortable to type on. Even enjoyable, because each letter clacks into place, and you can find yourself trying for longer and longer runs of uninterrupted strokes, just to hear and feel the mechanical movement beneath your fingertips.

The G610 Orion Brown is solidly built, without a hint of flex, in a gleaming black exterior that’s more or less identical to the G810 Orion Spectrum (RGB lighting, Romer G switches, $30 more). It’s plastic, though, and the keyboard’s footprint is on the small side in a market that’s seeing wider and deeper models, with more exposed metal, released every month.

You don’t get any built-in wrist support, which is a good choice, because that sort of thing is highly subjective, and best left to the user to arrange. Four soft rubber pads prevent it from sliding around on your desk, and two small feet can jack the back up in three stages if you want more of a slope, undoing the work of the pads somewhat in the process.

The top-right is the home of the media keys and, as with the G810, these are a disappointment. We can see the rationale behind not sitting them on mechanical switches, but when every other key slides like a greased stripper, a tinny membrane switch is going to look like an afterthought. It’s nice to have them, though; the volume roller is wide enough for precise adjustments, and the Game Mode key— which disables the dastardly Windows key, so you don’t pop the Start menu up by mistake—is a godsend for the clumsy. LIGHT INDUSTRY There are no additional programmable macro keys, but the F keys can be assigned functions using the reliable Logitech Gaming Software—we guess they couldn’t come up with a name for it, having wasted all their creative effort on the hardware names. The software also controls the lighting, which comes in any color you like, as long as it’s white. This is all you need in a keyboard—enough to see it in dim conditions, and able to be customized in conjunction with that Game Mode button, to highlight WASD when you switch from Excel to Doom. You can make waves ripple across the board, or keys light up when you strike them, but these are novelty acts that you might use once, then never touch again—much like the Logitech Gaming Software itself. Once it’s set up, this is a keyboard you’ll rarely tinker with.

Without RGB lighting, USB passthrough, or headphone ports, there’s an admirable purity about the G610. It’s not pretending to be anything it’s not, and its functions are pared back to only the most useful. The 26-key rollover is enough for you to get all fingers and toes on it without a problem, the 50-million-keystroke lifespan of the switches means it’ll last, and the slender footprint makes it a convenient companion for a cluttered desk.

Logitech has made some great products recently, its gaming mice especially leading the field in terms of features and usability. This keyboard, and those above it in the range, show that the Swiss firm is capable of restraint, too. –IAN EVENDEN