Corsair K83 Wireless Review – Lounge Keyboard Perfected
Corsair is best known for their premium gaming products, from their K95 Platinum, to their myriad of RGB options – but this though is pretty different. This is their K83 Wireless, a home theatre, multimedia keyboard and trackpad, with some interesting features to boot. Let’s take a look.
Starting off with build quality, this is brilliant. The top plate is brushed aluminium, with the bottom being plastic. It feels well reinforced and certainly premium in the hands. Styling wise, I personally think this look beautiful, especially with the white LED backlighting.
Typing wise, this is great, it actually feels like a mechanical keyswitch, which is very high praise. The keys are reinforced well so don’t really wobble, and have a nice, fairly tactile feel with reasonable travel, at least for a chiclet design anyway.
The trackpad side is where this differentiates itself from the other, lets face it, cheaper, multimedia keyboards. It’s got a circular touch pad, with tracks well, handles gestures well too, and has physical left/right click buttons at the bottom which have a decent enough feel to them.
What’s really different here is the top part, you’ve got a beautiful metal volume roller which if you’ve used any of Corsair’s newer keyboards with one of these, you’ll understand why I like this so much. You’ve also got a full on joystick which depending on which mode you’re in can control a multitude of options, including mobile gaming. There’s also a couple of buttons less obvious to you, on the top and under side, which also change functions depending on your mode.
I’ve mentioned mode enough now that I should explain what I mean. Corsair have opted to limit what you can customise in their iCUE software, to just the main keyboard portion, the rest of the functionality is – at least currently – locked depending on if you press FN + 1, 2 or 4, – or +, with the main two being media mode as mode 1, and “Gaming” with 2. The modes don’t change all that much, just what the extra buttons like the joystick do, essentially just changing it from a multimedia selector, to a mouse cursor.
The reason they went for this was because it’s “meant for the home entertainment market and a lot of these users woulds be confused so have the modes instead” – to me this doesn’t really make sense. I get having modes, but they aren’t labeled on the keyboard, and weren’t intuitive to a techie like me to find without specifically asking. I don’t see why you can’t change what these “modes” do, or manually change the functionality in iCUE, so as a more power user you can make the most of this premium device.
Getting back to its functionality though, connectivity wise, it’s pretty interesting. In the box you get a small USB receiver that you can use with your HTPC, then with a press of a key you can swap to your phone via bluetooth, then another key to swap to your tablet – as you can have 2 bluetooth devices paired and swap between them easily.
Battery life wise, it’s got a 2070mAh cell inside, which can last for up to 40 hours of use – assuming the white LED backlight is off. You’ve got 3 brightness levels above off though, so worse case on full brightness you are looking at around 8 hours. It charges by a micro USB port on the top, which I really would rather have seen a Type C port for durability and longevity, but I suppose you aren’t meant to use it while plugged in so ah well.
So rounding it off then, is it worth the £100 price tag? It’s certainly nice. Build and material quality is brilliant, typing feel is great, and the track pad is good too – I just wish it was more customisable and I did have a little issue with the 2.4GHz USB connection if I didn’t have line of sight it just stopped registering key presses, but overall it’s still a fantastic living room option, if a tad pricey.
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Products shown provided by: Corsair
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