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Comment by dannyobrien | Hacker News Reader

I'm a happy owner of a Tex Shinobi and Tex Shura. It's pretty hard to get a good trackpoint experience and Tex have done a good job getting right over the years (including producing a Lenovo-branded mechanical keyboard). They're a small shop based in Taiwan.

Shura is $169.

https://tex.com.tw/collections/keyboard

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Those boards are absolutely gorgeus. I'm not looking for a trackpoint or a standard layout, but I'm still tempted to buy one.

I used the Tex keycaps for a keyboard I built about three years ago. After three years of daily usage I have noticed a lot of wear on the keycaps. Some letters are barely visible, and some of the caps have gotten really shiny, i.e. they have lost their surface structure.

Have you noticed something similar? Other than that they feel really nice and I like them a lot.

The Shura uses double-shot keycaps, where the legends are a different colored plastic whereas earlier TEX models used UV printed or laser etched keycaps.

TEX’s older method is common to a lot of keyboard manufacturers and is prone to wear like you’ve seen. By contrast double-shot keys will get shiny, but their legends will always be legible no matter how many years they’re used.

Those keycaps are doubleshot ABS, though, and ABS is widely considered to be an inferior material compared to PBT. At that price, you would expect the latter.

I’m not too surprised because PBT as a material is harder to work with. It’s more prone to shrinkage and large caps like the spacebar are prone to warping, and this compounds if you try to do doubleshot PBT.

Most of the affordable PBT caps I’ve seen have been dyesub (which can be very durable if done well) or PBT-ABS blend doubleshot.

Yeah, dyesub can be super durable. For the past few years I've rotated between several keyboards as daily drivers. All with dyesub PBT keycaps that retailed in the $30-$40 range.

Zero issues with the dyesub labels.

I generally prefer them to doubleshot PBT, because dyesub labels tend to be much crisper than doubleshot labels. Though, of course, you can find ultra-crisp doubleshot labels or fuzzy dyesub labels.

Absolutely.

By any objective measure PBT is the winner in all regards.

For cheaper keycaps that come with an office or "gaming" keyboard, sure, but not for higher end ones. PBT doesn't shine after a lot of usage like ABS, true, but high end ABS keycap colors and the sharpness of double-shot legends still tend to be better than PBT (e.g., GMK). Sound and texture is quite variable too, so it's really just a matter of preference. I've used nice PBT keycaps but tend to prefer how nice ABS feels and sounds better.

Thank you for the explanation.

If you're in Japan, you can get,

https://archisite.co.jp/products/archiss/quattro/tkl-jp/

, for ~ 15000 円＝ $100.

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