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KitGuru has reviewed many keyboards over the years – suited to a variety of tastes and demands. Today we are looking at the Topre Type Heaven model featuring high grade Electrostatic Capacitive Switches rated at 50 million keystrokes. Is it worth the $150 asking price?
As the name would suggest, the Type Heaven keyboard by Topre is primarily designed with one goal in mind – to achieve the best experience for users who spend a lot of time typing.
Topre may not be an immediately well known name in the enthusiast sector, but they are an electrical, plastics and metal materials manufacturer based in Japan. They also create touch sensors, industrial credit card readers and touch panels. How is this relevant to a keyboard you say? Well Topre key switches are used in critical data entry applications in industries that require the highest levels of reliability.
The Type Heaven keyboard arrives in a plain black box with elegant gold type highlighting the product name on the front of the box.
The label bottom left of the box explains some of the key features including the Electrostatic Capacitance Key Switches and 6 key rollover.
The more observant among you will already have noticed that our particular sample is distributed in America by Seasonic, best known for their class leading power supplies. While Seasonic are not the sole distributor in America, they are offering a 2 year warranty with every unit sold.
Seasonic say that this keyboard might make it to European shores sometime in the future, although this is not confirmed right now. You can import one however from various locations if interested.
Inside the box is a warranty leaflet, alongside a thin user guide. The warranty leaflet from Topre does state that the keyboard has only a single year warranty, but clearly Seasonic have a lot of faith in the design to effectively double it. We tested the keyboard on both OSX 10.9 Mavericks and Windows 7/8.
You can import these via ebay if anyone can’t find them in local stores. they make more expensive models – this one is considered their budget model, still good though, but as the reviewer said= no frills and quite boring looking, but great keys.
I had to laugh when you said you hit the enter key in the top part. I’m a fully trained RSA Text Processor Level 3, RSA Typing Level 3 and Word Processor Level 3 Typist and here are my thoughts on your review:
Advice: When you press the ‘return’ key, your index finger on your right hand should not lift off the ‘j’ key. Similar to you left index finger not lifting off the ‘a’ key when pressing ‘b’. You’ll learn this in RSA level 1 lessons. Seen as a bad habit of so called ‘touch’ typists.
So if you are a typist which this keyboard is aimed at don’t worry too much. As having a single height ‘return’ key gives you a double length left shift.
Typists don’t need backlit keys by the way… touch typing is about muscle memory not using sight.
The left profile of the keys is to the perfect setup for typing for the placement of using your fingers. Many keyboards overlook this. This is also for the keypad too. This may have felt weird to you as you are used to a flat/flatter keyboard design. Pictures of these profiles are not used in your review and is a major selling point of the keyboard.
Furthermore as the keyboard is not mechanical it doesn’t need maintenance, e.g. oiling keys and you can type with 30g of pressure on the keys too which give less noise on this keyboard.
Finally, with correct actuation of the key profiles and less pressure needed for the key to type this keyboard offers you long typing sessions without fatigue in the fingers. Trust me I’m a typist and when you type for 8 hours a day you’ll notice the upgrade.
As for buying in the UK… go here… http://www.keyboardco.com/keyboard/topre-type-heaven-104-key-usa-45g-black-keyboard.asp