AJazz AK33 75% Mechanical Keyboard

[Oscargot]

A few months back I became interested in buying a new mechanical keyboard. I was stepping up from a fairly standard membrane affair from Dell and wanted to try something different. As with everything I researched for weeks in order to find something that I felt offered a good value and so far, 4 months into my purchase of the Ajazz ak33 I have not regretted my choice.

 

Spoiler

Packaging:

I was impressed with the packaging. The board was kept snug within a cover and some soft closed cell foam. Different boards have been reported to come with different accessories. Mine came with the cable and a random mouse mat, as well as some documentation all of which is in Chinese. Other reviews of this board have stated it to come with ring key-cap pullers and even brushes but these aren’t too important.

 

I’ll start with the basics, this is a 75% keyboard sporting 82 keys making it very close to the functionality of a tenkeyless board (only lacking five keys) yet managing to fit in a much smaller form factor thanks to its zero wasted space. This board is closer to the size of the much less functional 60% boards than a tenkeyless one.

It’s available in a few flavours. All boards can either come with blue or black switches from a brand named “Zorro” or I’ve heard the newer ones are branded as “Ajazz.” No surprises here, they’re just another clone of the Cherry MX switches, though as I’ll discuss later, they’re not exactly the same.

As well as coming with different switches it can come in a few different colours:

 

• Black with white backlight

• Black with orange/yellow gradient backlight

• White with blue backlight

• Black/White (I think, though I can no longer find this one in stock) with rgb backlight

 

I opted for the black one with a white backlight with black switches.

 

Switches

 

So, how are those switches?

 

In short (bearing in mind they’re the only mechanical switches I have ever used) they’re pretty awesome. So much better than a membrane board. They are lighter than Cherry blacks and their actuation force is more similar to that of a Cherry red, in fact some (there is some inconsistencies from key to key, but it is not noticeable) are even lighter than the 45g for a Cherry red.

It’s worth noting though that the poorer tolerances that can be inferred from the inconsistent actuation force could impact the longevity and quality of the switches; in fact my “Y” key has developed a slightly scratchy feel (though only noticeable when pressing the key lightly on its own).

 

Physical tour/Build Quality

 

I was impressed on the build quality of this keyboard considering the price. It sports a floating key design with transparent switches for the white backlight, an aluminium (or something that looks relatively like aluminium to my unobservant eyes) that nicely reflects the light to glow between the switches. I was not, however, impressed with the use of glossy plastic on the base and sides of the keyboard. Yuck. Everyone hates glossy plastic except the manufacturers – please stop using it x]

Luckily this is only on the bottom so for the most part you never have to see it. Speaking of the bottom what’s there? There are four rubber feet and 2 rubber tipped flip up feet that are very nice to see. The removable mini usb cable is on the left side of the back of the board. The cable itself is nothing special, just a standard rubber affair though it has a different usb A end with Ajazz branding which makes it distinguishable from the other things plugged into the system, nice touch.

Spoiler

Layout

 

The main reason this keyboard stands out from the crowd is its layout. The 75% layout has two main flavours: 82 keys and 84 keys. The AK33 is the former of the two. While this retains the staggered top row as opposed to the gridded layout of the top two rows on an 84 board, it does entail the use of many oddly shaped non-standard keys. Esc, Del, End and the arrow keys are much larger than normal with the left Ctrl and Shift being shorter to compensate. The left shift took a while to get used it, as I’d often hit the up arrow instead but I must say that I’ve never used right Ctrl so I can’t say too much about that. Also Fn is in a weird place, what’s up with that?

One other “issue” is that the board only comes in the American layout which took a bit of adjusting to coming from a UK board (I mean, is backslash so important as to need a bigger key? I didn’t think so.)

While the odd layout and contoured key shape (meaning the top row keys are really really tall) means that custom keycaps will be very difficult to come by it shouldn’t be too necessary as thankfully this board uses a standard, non-gamer-y edgy typeface that should be just fine.

 

Spoiler

 

Backlighting

 

As I’ve already covered, there are many options for backlighting depending on the model but I can only really talk about mine. There’s also not much to talk about (a good thing in my mind). I, like most people, keep it on a constant backlight but there are some other modes too that can be cycled with Fn and F8:

 

• Constant on

• Breathing

• Downward ripple/wave

• Some crazy waterfall thing

• Off

There are also five brightness levels ranging from just about right for me to distractingly bright, so that’s all fine. (Brightness controlled by function and the up and down arrows, Fn and the left/right arrows controls the speed of the effects)

Also worth noting is that the caps lock light is red and does spill out beyond its own key making it a bit distracting to use.

 

Final Thoughts

 

I was very impressed with this board. Although I don’t have too much experience with mechanical keyboards yet this board is good enough to make me want to experience more. You can rest assured that I have been converted and now membrane keyboards just feel… Well just not as good. Let’s round up all the segments with a score from 1-10.

 

Packaging: 10 – no problems here whatsoever

Switches: 8 – fine apart from the inconsistencies and the doubts I have about longevity

Build Quality: 8: - Beautiful looking board but I can’t say how butthurt I am about that glossy plastic

Layout: 9 - I feel 75% is a great balance of functionality and space taken up. The only things that bother me are the non standard key sizes and the typos and errors that those entail.

Backlighting: 9 – RGB is the only thing that could be better here and there’s an option for that (though at a slightly higher (but still very low) price.

 

All in all this is a fantastic board for the price and I would highly recommend it.

Wow… did I just write all this..?