Alright, it’s not all black and green. Some is green and black. Some is StarCraft blue and a couple pieces are TRON blue. But in the end, it’s all cool. I had some time to stop in at the Razer business booth and chat and get some hands on with the new gear. It was time extremely well spent.

I sat down with Timo for a quick chat and then we got down to the business of talking about the gear. There was a lot of information so I’m compressing it for you.

The Black Widow Gaming Keyboard - 4lbs. of it...

Yes, it’s a 2kg, roughly 4.4 pound mechanical keyboard from Razer. Heavy and cool and fully featured. One of the first things you might not notice about the keyboard is the activation pressure. A normal keyboard has about 60 to 80 grams of pressure for key activation. The Black Widow has only 50 grams. Any lighter and it would be a problem with accidental key activation. So that means faster, lighter typing of those game commands requiring less energy and lowering finger fatigue in those long game sessions. The keys also activate after 2 millimeters of travel, even though the full travel distance is 4 mm. This helps in the quick activation department and will definitely give you a speed increase. Unlike membrane keyboards this has a nice metallic click per key thanks to the mechanics in the unit. Along with the full metal baseplate (sounds like a new film about professional gaming warfare) it adds up to a heavy, sturdy unit that won’t slide across the slickest of desktops.

All in all it’s quite a tactile experience over a standard membrane keyboard. It also features full programmability with an unlimited macro system that gives you up to 10 profiles. Macro recording is done right on the keyboard with just two keys to begin and end recording. This means you don’t even need to open another piece of software to go and make the macros, you can do it right in the game and on the fly. It also has five extra keys down the right side that can be used for macro storage giving you a full keyboard plus. Each key is individually backlit so they are all the same brightness, something that my Sidewinder X6 can’t really compare with.

There are two versions, the standard and the Ultimate edition for $79.99 (same in Euro) and $129.99 (ditto) respectively. The difference seems to be the backlighting system, Audio-out, Mic-in jacks and the USB-passthrough are all missing on the standard.