In Use:

On their website Tesoro offers a software package to manage the Excalibur V2's special features. Now that I have used a few of their products, and actually have two of them installed on one PC (a mouse and a keyboard), one thing I would like to see is a unified program that could be use to manage all of their devices, instead of a different program for each. We will look at the Excalibur V2's software below, and once I installed I realized it was quite similar to the Excalibur Spectrum software, but not quite the same...

The below left image shows the main screen of the software, where you can access your various profiles, as well as the menus to configure the different features of the keyboard. We are in PC mode for this screenshot, where you see most options are grayed out, and you must select one of the other 5 profiles in order to get full customization options. The below right image shows the Macro menu has been activated for Profile 1. Overall the setup makes configuring a macro quite easy and you will be able to see what you have done before saving it. What I didn't like here and on other menus, is that the font is very small, and that I would occasionally goof up the OK, Cancel, and Apply steps. If you take a close look at the below right image you will see a large strip of buttons which include an OK, Cancel, and Apply button, as well as a smaller less obvious strip that includes an OK and Cancel button. You have to say OK in the top strip first, then say OK in the lower strip. I can't tell you how many times I immediately clicked on the larger set of buttons and would get confused as to why nothing happened. They should obscure that lower strip when you are in a submenu since you can not access it anyway.



The below left image shows the Key Assignment menu, where you can go through each key and set a new function for your different profiles. As shown, the space bar will now be the F6 key. The below right image shows the Sync Program button where you can make the keyboard recognize when a certain program has been launched and switch itself to the appropriate profile. This is a great feature, making your profiles for different games or photo editing applied without having to anything other than launching the program.



The next two images show the keyboard all lit up, with the lighting on at full intensity. It looks like the light is too strong, but that is the fault of the camera, not the keyboard. The characters and symbols are very easy to see in any ambient conditions, and you can always dim the lights or turn them off if you want. I also like the definition given to each key from the back lighting... each key surface is well lit up, but their is a faint glow between keys which makes locating your spot easy in very low light.