Long-Term Testing For At-Home Work

The MX Mechanical keyboard is geared towards productivity, and Logitech has taken care of every aspect to augment your creative output. The keyboard is loaded with rather unique features that make it quite desirable, especially if you want it for a seamless and convenient experience.

The first feature bound to seize your attention is the keyboard’s white backlight. Seeping through the laser-etched letter cutouts on the dark-colored keycaps, the white backlight offers good visibility at most angles. The visibility is affected when the keyboard is kept under direct light because of the ABS keycaps’ high reflectivity.

The MX Mechanical keyboard features an ambient sensor that automatically adjusts the backlight brightness with the ambient lighting. This happens to ensure the battery is not wasted by keeping the keys backlit when you don’t need them. If you do not like how bright the keyboard’s backlight is, you can also increase or decrease the intensity manually using the F3 or F4 buttons.

The automatic brightness, however, has one disadvantage: it gets turned off if the ambient light is too bright, and there is no way to override this setting. When you try to adjust the brightness manually, you get a warning on the screen notifying you the brightness cannot be turned on. You might successfully turn on the light by restarting the keyboard manually, but this method does not always work. Sometimes, you can only turn on the backlight after you go through the discomfort of turning off or changing the ambient light and then waiting for a few seconds for the keyboard to register this change.

Another method the Logitech MX Mechanical keyboard uses to keep battery consumption low is to sense your presence using a proximity sensor. This proximity sensor turns the light off when it can’t find you around and turns it back on when it can detect you at a distance of a few centimeters.

While the keyboard’s accuracy in detecting movement and nearness is perfect, I cannot say so about the process of turning the keys off, which is relatively more random.

Waving your hand above the keyboard to wake it up from sleep can be a cool nerd party trick, but it is not exactly useful — unless you tend to use it in an absolutely dark environment.