Saitek Eclipse III Backlit Multimedia Keyboard (PC)

I bought this product just after christmas '08 to replace a faithfull old keyboard. It is a great replacement.

The keyboard itself is lit from underneath the keys, illuminating the board and the keys themselves. Great for late night gaming and looks very cool to boot.

A nice element is the touch sensitive strip at the top of the board. It allows you to remove the key illumination, change the colour of the board (purple, pink, red or blue) or the brightness. If you run the speakers through the audio in jack, hidden at the back of the board, you can also change the speaker volume. Next to the speaker volume are play, rewind and FF touch buttons. These were immediately compatible with iTunes with no driver downloads (Vista 64).

I am not a fan of 'hot keys' or 'media keys' attached to keyboards but this one has some very good additions. There are dedicated e-mail keys located to the sides, one which open a new tab in your browser for example. This even works in Mozilla Firefox. Another hot key opens the MS calculator. I am forever scrabbling to find it! Others your default media player/email program/browser. They are located at the sides, not within the normal layout, so no mis-hitting.

The keystrokes feel OK, it is not the horrible 'laptop' style flat keys which seem popular lately.

The keyboard is full sized with good sized enter, shift and delete keys as well as a separate cursor pad and number pad.

I would definitely recommend.

This is such a nice keyboard...unwrapped it and i was just amazed by how well made and just awesome it looked...it is very big compared to most keyboards you get, but this isn't a problem for me personally. The keys are very easy to use make a rather nice clunk noise so they are not silent but its not loud aether, just sounds nice and solid and wont fall apart. The "touch screen" controls at the top are very responsive and work perfectly, i also have my headphones and mic hooked up threw the keyboard which also works perfectly, definitely happy with this keyboard and is worth the price!

[list of colours]
blue
purple
pink
a brighter pink
red

[hotkeys along both sides]
[left side, internet]
home, forward, backward, new tab, refresh, favourite.
[right side, general]
sleep, my computer, search, e-mail, music, calculator.

I brought one of these back in January, where I had an issue with the touch panel, whereby every now and again, it would mute the systems sound, and then the touch panel would just stop working. This then started happening more frequently, so I decided to return it.
I emailed amazon on a Sunday, and recieved an email back from them within about 30 minutes! They sent a replacement out the next day, to recieve it on tuesday, and had DHL to come and collect the old one. Second to none customer service! Thank you Amazon!

Anyway, to the product itself. Firstly, as others have said, it is big, so before buying, make sure you have enough room on your desk.

The keyboard has shortcut keys to various things on ethier side of the keyboard, which I find pretty useful. However, there is no software included that will change what these keys do, but you can change the programs it opens through setting different things as default, such as if you want the music key to open a particular music application, set that as your default music application.

The touch panel allows you to change the backlight, volume, mute, play/pause and fast forward/rewind, and if you install the drivers from saiteks website, the volume part will light up and dim dependent on the systems volume. However, I have found that this touch panel can be a little annoying to use, as it doesn't respond all that well when you try to change the volume

The Keys themselves are ok, however, they aren't anything amazing to type with, but you should get used to them.
The keyboard is relatively comfortable to type on, the wrist rest is fine.

There is a headphone and microphone 3.5mm jacks on the top right side, which can come in useful. You don't have to use them for headphones/microphones though, you could say, have two audio outs from it, or 2 microphones or whatever. It comes with gold plated connecters and what seems to be fairly good connecters, so I doubt you'd be loosing too much sound quality through using it.

The backlight is very useful when typing in a dark room, and looks pretty cool too, I usually have it on red or blue, there is also 3 shades of purple/pink. You can alter the brightness, but I always just have it on full. I personally would have liked the brightest setting to be a little brighter, but that's just me. I have noticed that the Eclipse logo on my new one isn't actually lit up, I'm not really bothered though, but with the other faulty one, and this, it doesn't show much quality control, but maybe I'm just unlucky, as I have not read anyone elses reviews where they have had any problems with it whatsoever.

Pros:
Nice backlit keys, changable colour and brightness
Useful shortcut keys
Relatively nice to type on
Headphone/microphone ports

Cons:
First one faulty
Touch panel controls can be a bit unresponsive
Would have liked it to be a little brighter
Very expensive, at over £40

Overall, it is a nice keyboard, however, is worth the amount it's being sold for? I'll let you decide.

Thanks again to amazons awesome customer service!