Early in 2015 we took our first look at a product from Tesoro, which happened to be their Gandiva H1L laser gaming mouse. The features and performance were impressive and we have been interested in checking out more of what this rather young company had to offer. We finally have that chance in this review, which will cover their Excalibur Spectrum keyboard.



While the promotional image above doesn't reveal anything exciting about this input device, there really quite a few special features to be impressed by. This is a mechanical keyboard available with either brown, red, or blue switches and every key features custom programmable RGB lighting which can provide over 16 million colors. We will walk through the coolness of this as we proceed through the review, which not only includes being able to make each key light up in any color you want, but also the availability of seven lighting modes, and 512KB of onboard memory for storing profiles in the keyboard and not on your computer.

Before taking a look at the sample provided for review, let's cover some of the features and specifications taken from the product page on the Tesoro website...

Features:

» Mechanical Switch (choice of brown, red, or blue)
» Spectrum Backlit Illumination
» Trigger/Ripple/Firework/Radiation/Breathing/Wave Marquee/Spectrum Lighting Effect
» N-Key Roll Over / 6KRO
» Fully Programmable

Specifications:

» Dimensions: 450 mm (wide) x 145 mm (long) x 24 mm (high)
» Memory: 512KB
» Profiles: 5
» Backlighting: RGB
» Lighting modes: 7
» Key lifespan: 60 million keystrokes
» Multimedia keys: 6
» Programmable keys: all
» Connection: USB
» Cable length: 1.55m
» USB ports: no

As mentioned above, you can get the Excalibur Spectrum with one of three types of mechanical switches. We will be looking at a unit with brown switches that do not produce a click when pressed, but do give you solid feedback so you know your entry has registered.