The Saitek Cyborg Keyboard is a great keyboard, both for normal use and for gaming. The Cyborg keys are a great feature and really do make this a proper gamer’s keyboard.
But why stop at games? The macros are flexible enough to allow you to program your favourite tasks from your Windows environment, so you could launch all of your favourite applications from their own C-key. You then click on the icon on the Windows taskbar to toggle between your profiles.
One particularly useful feature of the SST software is that it allows multiple profiles to be defined, so you can set the C-keys up for each of your favourite games.
This is a great feature for MMO and RTS games, allowing you to string a series of commands/attacks/spells/potions together into one simple button press. The software is a powerful utility that allows you to define complex series of keystrokes with timing information, meaning you can recreate in-game actions in the software and trigger them with just a single press of a C-key.
The keys don’t do anything at all until you’ve programmed so its important that you install Saitek’s SST software, which is included on the CD.
There are twelve C-keys in total, six down each side of the keyboard, and their functions are decided by the setup in the driver software. So having looked at the Saitek Cyborg’s lighting, now let’s look at the other big gaming feature, the programmable Cyborg keys (or C-keys). Also, the glossy surface of the touch-panel is prone to showing fingerprints! Most of the time it worked great, but occasionally I pressed a button and it failed to respond, even though I was sure I’d applied enough pressure in the right are of the touch-panel. The touch panel is also a bit hit-and-miss in its responses. I think the colour scheme would have benefited from having just the three primary colours – red, yellow and green, with the addition of blue as seen on Saitek’s Eclipse II. There’s very little difference as you move through each of the five shades of colours, with little contrast between red and orange, orange and yellow etc. That’s only really obvious when the room is completely dark.Īlso, the choice of colours isn’t great. Also, the consistency of the lighting isn’t perfect, with a few slightly duller areas. The backlighting is bright enough, but there is a lot of colour bleed between the areas of the keyboard if you have adjacent zones in different colours. The keyboard remembers your settings even if you unplug it, so you can keep your favourite colour scheme. To change the lighting it’s a simple case of pressing the corresponding area on the touch panel and then cycling through the colour and brightness options.
The lighting is one of the Cyborg’s biggest selling points and is controlled from the touch-sensitive panel at the top of the keyboard.
That’s quite a list! So let’s open the box and take a closer look. Pass-through USB, audio and microphone sockets.Adjustable wrist-rest and keyboard rake angle (front and back).Hard-wearing metal-plated key caps in key gaming areas.Gold-plated connectors for USB and audio.Enhanced multiple keypresses in gaming areas for complex in-game commands.Set and forget – persistent key illumination settings ensure colours remain even after a system reboot.Cyborg mode – instantly disable the Windows keys and configure the colour and brightness of your gaming keys at the touch of a button.Multi-colour backlighting with Tru-Vu illumination through keys (mix shades from Res through Amber to Green) and adjustable brightness.Touch-sensitive, backlit dashboard control panel including Media Controls.WASD, cursor, ‘Cyborg’ and NumPad key lighting can be independently controlled to highlight commonly used gaming keys.To start off let’s remind ourselves of the official features from the marketing blurb: