Drop’s new mechanical keyboards are a different take on a familiar design

At first glance, there’s nothing special about mechanical keyboard retailer Drop’s new collection of keycaps. There is a white set with black letters, a black set with white letters and another colored set with a combination of yellow, blue, red and white keys. They’re so low-profile that they look almost identical to what you’d find on a standard keyboard, rather than the goofy designs that aftermarket keycaps are commonly known for.

But look beyond their color, and you’ll begin to see evidence of months of painstaking toil and over $1.5 million in development work. These seemingly ordinary keycaps are the first to use Drop’s new DCX profile, an ambitious attempt by the company to compete with a manufacturer widely regarded as producing the gold standard of aftermarket keycaps. In the parlance of mechanical keyboards, “profile” refers to the shape of the keys – which can range from small, compact cubes to towering retro typewriter-style pieces of plastic.

“We’ve focused extremely, extremely tightly on the quality of this product to be as high as possible, which I would say is unique from what others are offering,” the studio head tells me. by Drop, Kevin Mak, on Zoom. The DCX profile is more than just a new shape – it’s also intrinsically linked to the quality of the lettering on each key. So the development process also involved meticulously going through all the key legends to get their sizing and spacing.

Take a look at Drop’s key catalog today and you’ll see the same three letters appear over and over again: GMK. For many mechanical keyboard enthusiasts, the name GMK – a Germany-based manufacturer that produces “Cherry profile” keycaps – is synonymous with some of the highest quality keycaps.

There’s nothing particularly fancy about the style of GMK-produced keycaps. They’re not big, retro blocks that look like they belong in a computer terminal from the 1980s. Instead, they’re just well-produced and sturdy in a way that mechanical keyboard enthusiasts appreciate. Their keycaps are made of thick, high-quality plastic, and they use a double-shot process to create their keycap lettering. So rather than printing or using a dye process to get keycap legends on the keycaps, GMK instead uses two different plastics: one for the fingerboard and one for its lettering. The result is not only lettering that can never wear off, but also remarkably crisp and bright legends. This is also what connects the profile to the lettering style as they are both made by the same set of tools.

DCX is not intended to replace GMK keycaps in Drop’s catalog, and the company tells me that it plans to continue selling GMK keycaps for the foreseeable future. But after more than a decade of working with the German manufacturer, Drop’s business has slowed due to the number of other companies GMK works with.

That’s the problem with GMK. As an independent manufacturer, it manufactures keycaps not only for Drop, but also for all other designers and retailers who wish to produce a set of keycaps. GMK’s popularity means that wait times of 18 months or more for its keycaps are now the norm – long enough to test the patience of all but the most stoic of enthusiasts. By contrast, DCX keycaps should be able to go from idea to final shipment in just 4 to 6 months, says Drop.

The DCX design therefore inherits most of what people love about GMK keycaps. They’re double-shot, made of high-quality ABS plastic, and the square design should fit most standard mechanical keyboards. “We weren’t trying to copy it one-for-one,” says Mak, noting that Drop created his 3D models more or less from scratch, “but of course we were aiming for the same kind of results.” It’s similar enough that Drop expects some GMK keycap designs to be converted to use DCX in the future.

It’s a design that means DCX should feel familiar to anyone who’s ever used a mechanical keyboard. The keys are not very high, nor particularly discreet. They’re medium-sized, and their tops have a slight dip between the left and right sides of each key (otherwise known as a “cylindrical” shape, rather than the more retro “spherical” keycaps).

Designing a new keycap profile from scratch gave Drop the opportunity to address some of the long-standing annoyances with GMK keycaps. Mak is very careful not to claim that DCX is “better” than GMK, but he does highlight some of the issues people have with GMK designs.

Take “carrot marks”, the small imperfection left on a keycap where molten plastic has flowed into its mold. On GMK’s keycaps, these marks are found on the top of each keycap, a small speck on a set of keycaps that often cost well north of $100. Considering how expensive the sets are, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Drop sometimes sees customers cite them as a reason to return their keycaps. Drop’s solution with DCX is simple: he designed his tooling so that these marks are hidden under each key where they are completely invisible.

Another long-standing problem? The absence of Mac-specific command and option keys, which DCX now includes. They’re words rather than symbols (a decision Mak tells me is mostly stylistic), but at least Apple users won’t have to put up with captions that are obviously aimed at Windows machines.

But the biggest thing Drop hopes people will enjoy, even if they don’t specifically notice, is the attention he gives to every aspect of his lettering layout. Its legends are aligned and equidistant, and symbols, like the “^” on the 6 key, are much more proportional to the lettering they share a key with.

Finally, Drop’s advertised price for DCX means it offers a small price discount over GMK. A set of white-on-black GMK keycaps, for example, will set you back $110 at the time of this writing, while the base kit of an equivalent DCX set has a regular price of $99.

This is the second keycap profile Drop has made in-house. His first was MT3, a stylized keycap design invented by famed designer Matteo “Matt3o” Spinelli that was directly inspired by the keycaps used on older computer terminals. This time around, Drop decided to develop its new keycaps in secret as opposed to its double-hit MT3 keycaps, where the company started taking pre-orders through a “group buying” process (the name from the keyboard community for a Kickstarter-like pre-order structure) long before we have anything ready to ship. It’s a move that angered many in the community when his MT3 keycaps started facing delays.

“I think the biggest lesson we learned from MT3 is to calibrate ourselves to our expectations,” says Mak. “We launched them as a group buy in 2018 and told the community it would take eight months…we ended up taking two years, about three times that.” The result was many disgruntled customers who were hit with months of uncertainty before their keycaps finally arrived.

But even deciding to develop DCX behind closed doors hasn’t stopped the new keycap profile from generating controversy. When Drop initially announced the profile, it said it planned to call it “MT2” with the goal of creating a family of products around the MT3 profile naming scheme. But for Matt3o, the designer whose name is MT3 and who had no involvement (or even prior knowledge) of the design of MT2, the name was disrespectful.

“In a quick swoop, Drop used the success of MT3 to create a completely independent product and by calling it MT2, they also claim that the moniker MT is unrelated to me,” the designer wrote in a post. of blogging. In a comment posted under its MT2 announcement, Drop claimed that the “MT” in the MT2 name was “used to acknowledge the contributions of MiTo”, another popular keycap designer who had “been involved in the development and design of MT2”.

“We were really surprised,” Drop COO Jeffrey Holove told me of the review, “We were trying to convey that this is part of a family of Drop products. DCX is a profile lower than MT3 so ‘MT2’ made sense… it just so happened that the designer we were collaborating with on MT2 had an M and a T in their name so that was fine with us.

After the outcry, which was echoed by many other members of the keyboard community, Drop quickly announced a renaming of the new keycap profile, writing in a post that it would change the name from MT2 to DCX “out of respect for Matt3o’s contribution and our desire not to dilute the uniqueness of MT3 in the eyes of the community. Matt3o was quick to accept the concession and suggested that he would be willing to work with Drop again in the future. .

Priced at $99 for a standard base kit, Drop’s DCX Profile Keycaps are unlikely to be a gateway into the niche world of mechanical keyboards. But for those who are already comfortable spending the kind of money premium GMK keycaps currently command, they have the potential to be more readily available and slightly more affordable. As to whether they actually stand a chance of improving GMK’s legendary quality?

“We’re aiming for that,” says Kevin Mak of Drop, before quickly adding “the community has to decide.”