small keyboard Razer's new Huntsman
September 01, 2020
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So many boxes today. Okay. What is all this crap? It's Razer's new Huntsman Mini keyboard from their Huntsman line. Now they have a 60%keyboard joining the line.
A 60% keyboard is a small keyboard. It has no numpad, no function row, no navigation keys like Home and End, no arrow keys, it'sjust the alphanumerics. Pretty cool, prettytiny. Let's look at it. But what's this other crap? I have some extra keycaps.We'll get to those in a bit.
And some special boxes? Ihaven't even opened these. I can only guess what's inside. And I can also further guess that this is not available to the public, so is it even worth unboxing? Right after this message from our sponsor that we might as well justget over with already, right? Today's video is broughtto you by "War Thunder".
"War Thunder" is a free-to-play online military vehicle combat game. It's available on Windows, Mac, Linux, PS4 and Xbox One with cross-play. It features an incredible arsenal of over 1,500 historicallyaccurate playable tanks, aircraft, helicopters and ships from the 1930s to way up to the 1990s. It's got massive combined arms battles on over 80 major battlefieldsfrom World War II to, you guessed it, theend of the Cold War. So head to the link below andstart playing "War Thunder" for free, at the link below. And you'll also get an exclusive bonus. What's this? This is just a wooden box,some kinda metal hinges. There's a button on the front. Ooh! Huh? Okay. Cool. It is a keyboard. And it's personalized. How do I get you outta here? Oh, this little pull-tab maybe. (laughs) It says ShortCircuit on it! That is cool. Again, I'm pretty sure youwill not be able to get this.
Definitely can't get a ShortCircuit one. But here's the keyboard. Whatelse do we have in this box? "Dominate on a differentscale." Ha, cute writing. "Our first 60% keyboard,available in Razer clicky or improved linear optical switches." Improved. "Experiencing lightning-fast actuation in our most compact form factor yet. For Gamers, By Gamers, Razer." Also comes with a bag, which undoubtedly holds the USB-C cable. There it is.
hnice Razer cable tie. Flexible. Multiple steps. USB-C on that side. USB-A on that side. And it'swhite, matches the keyboard. Now, what do we havein our other wood box? Huh? Is it a black one? Huh? Yes it is. Okay. Cool. Let's see if Ican do this trick twice. Oh, this one actually justcomes out like normal. This is the clicky one.
(keys clicking) Black cable, black cabletie and even black little... What do you call these, hats? Condoms? Wait a second. Whoa, that's sweet. There's actually littlegrooves in this channel that correspond to femalegrooves on the plug so that there's no risk of the cable getting yanked in thisdirection, which would bend... Bend the end. That is just a nice step forlongevity and durability, things that Razer has nottraditionally been known for. So good for them for trying to rebuild their brand in that respect. Here they are.
But that's not really a complete unboxing 'cause that's not the boxyou guys are gonna get, so why don't we just ripthrough here really quickly? This is the clicky option in this box, which they call Purple. Their linears are also called Red. Cherry-style. Ow! That really hurt. This key is too girthy-endy. Okay, inside this much more simple box, your keyboard actually comes with plastic around it, shrink-wrapped. And again, the black one's clicky.
Now, the Mercury, or white color, and the black color are each available with either the clicky or linear. You can mix and match. It's just by coincidence thatboth my blacks are clicky. Look at all these keyboards.And we also have... Yeah, there's the cable for that one. And a little bag of books here. "You've got a great device in your hands, complete with a two-yearlimited warranty." Serial number. Oh, and look at that onthe back, that's nice. It says, "For Gamers.
By Gamers," over and over again like some kind of Bart Simpson chalkboard punishment, which is cool, it's on the bottom. It's like when the inside of your clothes, like the inside of your hood has a nice, neat pattern that youdon't see that often. You get that on likedress shirts sometimes by the cuffs or in the collar and it's just a nice toucheven though it's seldom seen. There're stands set for 6-degree and 9-degree tilt configurations.
I mean, they're both nice. I would probably go black,but it depends on your style. If you have a white caseor a white mouse already or your monitor, yeah, they're both nice. So... Where to begin? How 'bout the feel? How 'bout the feel? (keys clicking) Now, these are a lot quieter than previous Huntsman keyboards.
I understand that theyactually made an adjustment to the switch where they... Basically, underneath thatplus sign that you see there, there's a column, a tube. Inside of that tube they place dampeners. They used to have this metallic kinda ping that had this kindaroll-off on it, you know, when keyboard are like, "Bing." They used to have that.It's not so bad anymore. So the linear switches require40 grams of force to actuate and they just bottom out, ofcourse, 'cause they're linear. There's no tactile bumperor anything in them. And these are optical switches. They say that they're a little bit faster. They have fewer mechanical moving parts, so they should have higherdurability, be more consistent.
iwith it, though,is that these switches could come out, you stillcouldn't pop in any other switches other than just, Iguess, maybe the linears, like whatever that Razerprovides, you know? Whereas if you just got anormal mechanical keyboard there's just myriad switchesavailable, thousands of them, all different types, youcan really get into it. With this, you're kinda justmarried to what you get. If what you get is good thenstay married to it, whatever. These keys are pretty consistent.
And then on the clicky side... (keys clicking)These sound okay. Not the best sound I've ever... These only take 45 gramsof actuation force. This is still a gaming keyboard. You really don't have to press very far. I feel like I could get myshots off pretty immediately. All right, so why get a60-percenter? Two reasons, really. Either aesthetics, if youhave a really clean setup, if you want everything to be minimal. And the second reason to get a 60% is if you are the type of person who has a low-sensitivity mouseand you're playing shooters and you just need a lotta space for your mouse arm to whip around, it can be nice to not have thatextra stuff on your keyboard so you don't have to reach as far. You have more desk real estate and you don't get as much shoulder strain.
a third reason is portability. It's way easier to put a60-percenter into your backpack and go to a LAN partyor an esports tournament than it is a full-sized keyboard. Productivity wise, itsucks not having a numpad. For me, it sucks using second functions, but Razer says you lose nofunctionality on this keyboard because all the second functions are available on a secondary layer. And you can see where they are by looking at the side-printedlegend on these keys.
I wanna plug this in 'cause I wanna see if the light shines through there. And no, it looks likethe side-printed legend is just on there. To be fair, I don't think I've ever seen secondary functions be lit up, so... Now, you can see the light is shining through these otherkeys, and that is because these are double-shot injected which means that the black area you seehere is one layer of plastic and it would've had ahole in it for the words. And then there's a second layer of plastic which is white, you can see it. Therefore you can never scratch that off. There's no way to scratchthis off. It's impossible.
You'll wear through your fingers first. Another thing is thatthese are PBT plastic and so they're not gonna get shiny.
You know when you use akeyboard for a long time and you don't wash your handsbetween eating and gaming, what happens is that the plastic degrades and you get this shiny look on the most commonly used keys. That's not gonna happento these, so that's nice. I guess this is a good timeto talk about these other sold-separately keycaps that we got here. They're mostly just different colors. These are black. Razer Green.
Mercury White and Quartz Pink. So if you wanted to have ablack chassis with white keycaps or vice versa, or if you wanted to just, what I think looks cool, just have a certain number of them swapped out so you kinda of have likea half-and-half look, like panda-style, I think that can look really cool and striking. Is this really necessary? Oh yeah, all the little stabilizers and... Oh man, they're likevacuum-sealed in here.
It's like they're tofu or something. See, the issue with theseis that they don't have the side printing foryour secondary functions. I mean, I guess that'skind of understandable, and for 30 bucks this isactually a decent value. Oh, and you get a keycapremoval tool, so wow. I don't know how well the Quartz is gonna go with this black. They're kind of opposite pallettes. Yeah, that looks pretty bad. (laughs) I think I shoulda put it on... Let's try it on the white one. Yeah, this is already so much better. Ah! That's nice. It's cute. When you have the coloredkeycaps like this, though, I feel like you're a little more limited with what RGB colors you can choose because some colors, theyjust don't look great when they're shining through. And so you might wannajust restrict yourself to something that looksgood with the color.
Like I don't feel like the red going through here looks very good. So like basically anykeyboard you can get, it has N-key rollover,it's got anti-ghosting. It actually, despite being a 60%, it has a standard bottomrow, which is nice. Sometimes these get kinda screwed up and things are movedaround, this is standard. It also has a game mode so that your Windows keywon't come up in games.
There's even media keyson the secondary row. The one thing that you can't do onboard, despite being able to havefive keyboard profiles that you can save on-device and despite there beingsome default RBG settings, as you saw me cycle through, on-device, there is no ability for youto create a new RGB profile and then save that to yourdevice and take it somewhere. You can make your own custom RGB profile, but you have to do that inRazer's Synapse software and then it'll save toyour account on Synapse.
So if I brought thiskeyboard somewhere else I would have to plug it into that machine, get Synapse on that machine, log in, and then I could have myprofile again on this. But the build quality is pretty nice. It's got an aluminum faceplate on it here. And you don't reallyget that much deck flex with these as is.
So it feels pretty stable. It's not as fat as that CandyBar keyboard I had a little while ago on ShortCircuit. And for weight, we're looking at 430-ish grams, which is like... That's fine. It's prettyaverage in terms of weight.
I wouldn't call it heavy for its size, or really too light. It's kinda normal. Pricing-wise. Kinda weird. $120 for the clicky version, making it the cheapestin the Huntsman lineup. However, an extra $10 for the presentlyunavailable linear version. Weird that there's a price difference.
I think it's because they justrevamped the linear switches from their previous iteration,so maybe they had to cover some R&D costs or something there. But 10 bucks difference. Not the cheapest keyboard out there, but it's Razer, so what did you expect? It's not a groundbreakingdevice, but it's cool. You'll probably like it. I don't know if they'regonna last in the long term. We'll have to wait and see. But you get a two-yearwarranty, so whatever. If you're a fan of Razer, if you wanna use your RazerChroma lighting effects with all your other devicesand your supported games and you want a 60% keyboard, then this is the one to go for.
So thanks for watching ShortCircuit. If you liked this video you might like our other previous reviewof the CandyBar keyboard that came with a cool kind of DIY kit, and that is a good foot in the door for enthusiast keyboards.
If you want somethingthat's plug-and-play, then this is the way to go. Bye.
A 60% keyboard is a small keyboard. It has no numpad, no function row, no navigation keys like Home and End, no arrow keys, it'sjust the alphanumerics. Pretty cool, prettytiny. Let's look at it. But what's this other crap? I have some extra keycaps.We'll get to those in a bit.
And some special boxes? Ihaven't even opened these. I can only guess what's inside. And I can also further guess that this is not available to the public, so is it even worth unboxing? Right after this message from our sponsor that we might as well justget over with already, right? Today's video is broughtto you by "War Thunder".
"War Thunder" is a free-to-play online military vehicle combat game. It's available on Windows, Mac, Linux, PS4 and Xbox One with cross-play. It features an incredible arsenal of over 1,500 historicallyaccurate playable tanks, aircraft, helicopters and ships from the 1930s to way up to the 1990s. It's got massive combined arms battles on over 80 major battlefieldsfrom World War II to, you guessed it, theend of the Cold War. So head to the link below andstart playing "War Thunder" for free, at the link below. And you'll also get an exclusive bonus. What's this? This is just a wooden box,some kinda metal hinges. There's a button on the front. Ooh! Huh? Okay. Cool. It is a keyboard. And it's personalized. How do I get you outta here? Oh, this little pull-tab maybe. (laughs) It says ShortCircuit on it! That is cool. Again, I'm pretty sure youwill not be able to get this.
Definitely can't get a ShortCircuit one. But here's the keyboard. Whatelse do we have in this box? "Dominate on a differentscale." Ha, cute writing. "Our first 60% keyboard,available in Razer clicky or improved linear optical switches." Improved. "Experiencing lightning-fast actuation in our most compact form factor yet. For Gamers, By Gamers, Razer." Also comes with a bag, which undoubtedly holds the USB-C cable. There it is.
hnice Razer cable tie. Flexible. Multiple steps. USB-C on that side. USB-A on that side. And it'swhite, matches the keyboard. Now, what do we havein our other wood box? Huh? Is it a black one? Huh? Yes it is. Okay. Cool. Let's see if Ican do this trick twice. Oh, this one actually justcomes out like normal. This is the clicky one.
(keys clicking) Black cable, black cabletie and even black little... What do you call these, hats? Condoms? Wait a second. Whoa, that's sweet. There's actually littlegrooves in this channel that correspond to femalegrooves on the plug so that there's no risk of the cable getting yanked in thisdirection, which would bend... Bend the end. That is just a nice step forlongevity and durability, things that Razer has nottraditionally been known for. So good for them for trying to rebuild their brand in that respect. Here they are.
But that's not really a complete unboxing 'cause that's not the boxyou guys are gonna get, so why don't we just ripthrough here really quickly? This is the clicky option in this box, which they call Purple. Their linears are also called Red. Cherry-style. Ow! That really hurt. This key is too girthy-endy. Okay, inside this much more simple box, your keyboard actually comes with plastic around it, shrink-wrapped. And again, the black one's clicky.
Now, the Mercury, or white color, and the black color are each available with either the clicky or linear. You can mix and match. It's just by coincidence thatboth my blacks are clicky. Look at all these keyboards.And we also have... Yeah, there's the cable for that one. And a little bag of books here. "You've got a great device in your hands, complete with a two-yearlimited warranty." Serial number. Oh, and look at that onthe back, that's nice. It says, "For Gamers.
By Gamers," over and over again like some kind of Bart Simpson chalkboard punishment, which is cool, it's on the bottom. It's like when the inside of your clothes, like the inside of your hood has a nice, neat pattern that youdon't see that often. You get that on likedress shirts sometimes by the cuffs or in the collar and it's just a nice toucheven though it's seldom seen. There're stands set for 6-degree and 9-degree tilt configurations.
I mean, they're both nice. I would probably go black,but it depends on your style. If you have a white caseor a white mouse already or your monitor, yeah, they're both nice. So... Where to begin? How 'bout the feel? How 'bout the feel? (keys clicking) Now, these are a lot quieter than previous Huntsman keyboards.
I understand that theyactually made an adjustment to the switch where they... Basically, underneath thatplus sign that you see there, there's a column, a tube. Inside of that tube they place dampeners. They used to have this metallic kinda ping that had this kindaroll-off on it, you know, when keyboard are like, "Bing." They used to have that.It's not so bad anymore. So the linear switches require40 grams of force to actuate and they just bottom out, ofcourse, 'cause they're linear. There's no tactile bumperor anything in them. And these are optical switches. They say that they're a little bit faster. They have fewer mechanical moving parts, so they should have higherdurability, be more consistent.
iwith it, though,is that these switches could come out, you stillcouldn't pop in any other switches other than just, Iguess, maybe the linears, like whatever that Razerprovides, you know? Whereas if you just got anormal mechanical keyboard there's just myriad switchesavailable, thousands of them, all different types, youcan really get into it. With this, you're kinda justmarried to what you get. If what you get is good thenstay married to it, whatever. These keys are pretty consistent.
And then on the clicky side... (keys clicking)These sound okay. Not the best sound I've ever... These only take 45 gramsof actuation force. This is still a gaming keyboard. You really don't have to press very far. I feel like I could get myshots off pretty immediately. All right, so why get a60-percenter? Two reasons, really. Either aesthetics, if youhave a really clean setup, if you want everything to be minimal. And the second reason to get a 60% is if you are the type of person who has a low-sensitivity mouseand you're playing shooters and you just need a lotta space for your mouse arm to whip around, it can be nice to not have thatextra stuff on your keyboard so you don't have to reach as far. You have more desk real estate and you don't get as much shoulder strain.
a third reason is portability. It's way easier to put a60-percenter into your backpack and go to a LAN partyor an esports tournament than it is a full-sized keyboard. Productivity wise, itsucks not having a numpad. For me, it sucks using second functions, but Razer says you lose nofunctionality on this keyboard because all the second functions are available on a secondary layer. And you can see where they are by looking at the side-printedlegend on these keys.
I wanna plug this in 'cause I wanna see if the light shines through there. And no, it looks likethe side-printed legend is just on there. To be fair, I don't think I've ever seen secondary functions be lit up, so... Now, you can see the light is shining through these otherkeys, and that is because these are double-shot injected which means that the black area you seehere is one layer of plastic and it would've had ahole in it for the words. And then there's a second layer of plastic which is white, you can see it. Therefore you can never scratch that off. There's no way to scratchthis off. It's impossible.
You'll wear through your fingers first. Another thing is thatthese are PBT plastic and so they're not gonna get shiny.
You know when you use akeyboard for a long time and you don't wash your handsbetween eating and gaming, what happens is that the plastic degrades and you get this shiny look on the most commonly used keys. That's not gonna happento these, so that's nice. I guess this is a good timeto talk about these other sold-separately keycaps that we got here. They're mostly just different colors. These are black. Razer Green.
Mercury White and Quartz Pink. So if you wanted to have ablack chassis with white keycaps or vice versa, or if you wanted to just, what I think looks cool, just have a certain number of them swapped out so you kinda of have likea half-and-half look, like panda-style, I think that can look really cool and striking. Is this really necessary? Oh yeah, all the little stabilizers and... Oh man, they're likevacuum-sealed in here.
It's like they're tofu or something. See, the issue with theseis that they don't have the side printing foryour secondary functions. I mean, I guess that'skind of understandable, and for 30 bucks this isactually a decent value. Oh, and you get a keycapremoval tool, so wow. I don't know how well the Quartz is gonna go with this black. They're kind of opposite pallettes. Yeah, that looks pretty bad. (laughs) I think I shoulda put it on... Let's try it on the white one. Yeah, this is already so much better. Ah! That's nice. It's cute. When you have the coloredkeycaps like this, though, I feel like you're a little more limited with what RGB colors you can choose because some colors, theyjust don't look great when they're shining through. And so you might wannajust restrict yourself to something that looksgood with the color.
Like I don't feel like the red going through here looks very good. So like basically anykeyboard you can get, it has N-key rollover,it's got anti-ghosting. It actually, despite being a 60%, it has a standard bottomrow, which is nice. Sometimes these get kinda screwed up and things are movedaround, this is standard. It also has a game mode so that your Windows keywon't come up in games.
There's even media keyson the secondary row. The one thing that you can't do onboard, despite being able to havefive keyboard profiles that you can save on-device and despite there beingsome default RBG settings, as you saw me cycle through, on-device, there is no ability for youto create a new RGB profile and then save that to yourdevice and take it somewhere. You can make your own custom RGB profile, but you have to do that inRazer's Synapse software and then it'll save toyour account on Synapse.
So if I brought thiskeyboard somewhere else I would have to plug it into that machine, get Synapse on that machine, log in, and then I could have myprofile again on this. But the build quality is pretty nice. It's got an aluminum faceplate on it here. And you don't reallyget that much deck flex with these as is.
So it feels pretty stable. It's not as fat as that CandyBar keyboard I had a little while ago on ShortCircuit. And for weight, we're looking at 430-ish grams, which is like... That's fine. It's prettyaverage in terms of weight.
I wouldn't call it heavy for its size, or really too light. It's kinda normal. Pricing-wise. Kinda weird. $120 for the clicky version, making it the cheapestin the Huntsman lineup. However, an extra $10 for the presentlyunavailable linear version. Weird that there's a price difference.
I think it's because they justrevamped the linear switches from their previous iteration,so maybe they had to cover some R&D costs or something there. But 10 bucks difference. Not the cheapest keyboard out there, but it's Razer, so what did you expect? It's not a groundbreakingdevice, but it's cool. You'll probably like it. I don't know if they'regonna last in the long term. We'll have to wait and see. But you get a two-yearwarranty, so whatever. If you're a fan of Razer, if you wanna use your RazerChroma lighting effects with all your other devicesand your supported games and you want a 60% keyboard, then this is the one to go for.
So thanks for watching ShortCircuit. If you liked this video you might like our other previous reviewof the CandyBar keyboard that came with a cool kind of DIY kit, and that is a good foot in the door for enthusiast keyboards.
If you want somethingthat's plug-and-play, then this is the way to go. Bye.