Logitech G15 Keyboard upgrade (v1 — v2)

After a lengthy email exchange with Logit­ech cus­tomer sup­port (star­ted Octo­ber 22, 2007), I’ve just received my replace­ment Logit­ech G15 key­board (affil­i­ate link).

The key prob­lem (par­don the pun) was that the black paint on a few of the keys was wear­ing off, allow­ing the back­light­ing to shine through obscur­ing any key let­ter­ing. This key­board was around a year old..maybe less.

Now, since I’d star­ted the pro­cess, Logit­ech updated and revised the G15 with:

• Reportedly improved key­board paint
• Orange back­lit key­board (the first one was blue)
• Reduced the num­ber of pro­gram­mable Gkeys from 18 to 6(!)
• Reduced the size of the LCD dis­play by appx. 40% though keep­ing the num­ber of pixels HxW
• Removed the abil­ity of the LDC dis­play to swivel
• Removed the volume con­trol wheel

Frankly, I was hop­ing for them to send me another v1 G15. I was com­fort­able with the desktop foot­print it had (huge), I liked the avail­ab­il­ity of all those pro­gram­mable keys, and I liked the size of the LCD display.

But now I’ve got a v2, and here are my ini­tial impressions:

• Key depress feel is soft…maybe mushy?
• Key­board sits dif­fer­ently on my desktop…I have to hunt ini­tially to place my fin­gers on the home row properly
• Key­board foot­print is smal­ler. I like this. I now have more desktop space for my mouse and Wacom Bam­boo tab­let.
• LCD Dis­play is very slightly out of align­ment in it’s hous­ing. Not too notice­able, but when I do it’s a minor annoyance.
• The key­board drivers and soft­ware were easy to install and setup
• Logit­ech main­tained com­pat­ib­il­ity with LCD­Stu­dio, so my cus­tom dis­plays run properly
• Not sure I like the smal­ler LCD display…we’ll see how it goes.
• I *think* I’ll like the orange back­light. It seems to glare less.
• The volume but­tons work ‘ok’, but the wheel seemed nicer — like the wheel on an iPod. Upside is I can still use the wheel/spot on the Wacom Bam­boo
• Mar­ket­ing: the Box and some online lit­er­at­ure do NOT men­tion that the key­board has 2 USB ports. I was wor­ried because the v1 G15 does have these, and I didn’t want to lose the abil­ity to plug in thumb drives..etc.
• Am I miss­ing the extra 12 macro keys? I’m not sure yet. The key­board lay­out is dif­fer­ent, but since I also have a Nos­tromo n52 key­board, I’m sure I can map any miss­ing func­tion­al­ity over to it.

Con­clu­sion: For now I’d say I’m sat­is­fied. The pro­cess took a while, I’m not con­vinced the paint on this key­board will last bet­ter than the last. The reduced LCD dis­play size could be an issue…but I’ll reserve judge­ment on it for now…and I think I like the orange backlight.

Tagged as: How to, Keyboard, Lifestyle Technology, Logitech