A run of the mill keyboard will set you back a few dollars and will provide a good deal of usage before you shell out another couple of bucks to replace it but considering many of the prodigious typists out there your usual spongy keyed keyboard doesn’t quite cut it.

Benchmark Reviews has a look at eight different mechanical keyed keyboards which provide all of the heavy duty hardware your keys deserve:

But individual mechanical key switches make a keyboard expensive, and a $200 keyboard makes no economic sense for a $399 desktop computer you pick up at Best Buy. Even a $50 keyboard is too much. Most OEM keyboards these days cost less than $5 to manufacture and are available at $20 or less at the retail level. Virtually all modern keyboards use some variant of the "rubber-dome" key spring, in which the spring action to push the key back up after it’s been depressed is provided by a dome molded in a sheet of rubber under each key. Depending on the keyboard, the dome may be part of the actual switch mechanism, with conductive material on the underside of the dome bridging contacts on a circuit board beneath it when the key is pressed, or the dome may merely provide the spring effect for a membrane-switch keyboard.

An impressive array of choices out there for those that want to get something a bit more durable and infinitely more satisfying to type on.

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