Recently I gone through a rash of bad mechanical keyboards. It seems that many of the mechanical keyboards (at least, the affordable ones) on Amazon have been very low quality. Around 6 months ago I picked up a mechanical keyboard with MX-red style clone switches, and it already started dropping the [e] and [i] keys pretty frequently.
Fed up, I decided to go with a name brand - Cherry.
I looked around and found the Cherry MC 3.0 Viola, which had a new kind of switch I haven't experienced before. The price was right, so I picked it up.
My first impression was - it's odd. The keys feel mechanical, but the force curve feels... "squishy" if that makes sense. It is very quiet, and I can actually type pretty fast and accurately on it. In fact, I think I'm probably more accurate with this keyboard than my old MX-Red even when it was working.
But yea, that force curve of the keys is very unique. It's bouncy. It's squishy. It's soft. You'd think it would be awful - but here's the thing: it's not.
While the initial impression was awkward, once I started using it, I immediately fell in love with this new squishy mechanical keys. They sound amazing - it sounds like you're typing on a cloud. Hard to explain, but the keys make noise but it's pretty dampened and not loud or intrusive at all. This keyboard would work great in an office. But once I starting using it daily, I got very comfortable with the typing. It let's me go fast with the subconscious precision of a mechanical keyboard, but is nice and quiet.
As for the materials, I also like the key-caps material. While I may change out the key caps in the future to see how these switches feel with different shaped keys, I have no desire to do it in the near term. These keys have a very soft finish, and really adds to the "typing on clouds" feeling I mentioned earlier.
There are a couple downsides, however.
First, the biggest problem is that Cherry added a key between Escape and F1 with a little Cherry logo on it. While I love the cool looking Cherry logo key, it causes my fingers to mistype F2 now. Whenever I want to rename a file, I end up pushing F1 which opens up Windows Help or some such thing. It's pretty annoying to keep mistyping F2, which is a pretty common shortcut for renaming. I'm sure I'll get used to it, but I'm really sensitive to nonstandard keyboard layouts, and that includes the F-keys.
The second problem doesn't really bother me that much, but I'm sure it would bother others. The keycaps have cutouts for the letters so the LED light can shine through the keycaps. While it looks really cool, you can actually feel them on your finger types. The keys, as mentioned, are really soft and feel great. But the clear plastic for the letters is a different material and you can feel it. It almost feels like something is stuck on your keys. While I've gotten used to it, it is a bit jarring. Of course, I can always replace the key caps with different ones later and that would fix the issue.
Overall, I love this key keyboard despite it's 2 flaws. Hopefully this one will last more than a few months - I'm betting on your name, Cherry.
