Saitek PK24 Eclipse III Wired Keyboard

The Eclipse III has a versatile backlighting system. With primary colors of Blue, Red, and Purple, it also has two blended colors, Magenta and Pink. Five different color options, with adjustable brightness. The letters themselves light, as well as the borders around each key. The keys are soft-touch, with laser etching. The product description states that settings are kept even after a reboot. One reviewer specifically stated that his always reverts to ‘blue’ after a reboot, but that it didn’t bother him.

It comes with touch-sensitive controls, and a bank of shortcut keys on both sides of the keyboard. The light and multi-media controls are rather nice. The shortcut keys may be useful or not, depending on your preferred style of interaction with windows.

In terms of bonuses, Saitek has thrown in some nice goodies. Pass-through headphone and mic jacks, a removeable wrist rest, and two levels of height adjustment to tilt the keyboard. These aren’t critical, but are a nice touch. The keyboard is plug and play,connecting by USB. Works with Windows 7, XP, and Vista. At 21 1/2″ long, it’s a pretty good-sized keyboard, but remember the hotkeys on each end take up some of that space. Still, the keys are full-sized, and comfortable to use.

I think one of the most telling gauges of quality is the customer ratings at Amazon. The Eclipse III has 509 total reviews. 1, 2, and 3-star ratings get approximately 30 votes each. 4-star gets 115 ratings, and the remaining 297 votes were 5-stars. The odd part is, many of the customer reviews, and nearly all of the bad ones, are actually for the Eclipse II, not the Eclipse III. I don’t know why they’re combined, because the two boards are distinctly different from each other. But it makes meaningful interpretation of numbers very difficult.

All that said, my overall impression of this backlit keyboard is positive. The lighting options are nice and versatile, with 5 colors and adjustable brightness. The extra features are nice, but may or may not be useful to you. It might lack the versatility of the Logitech G510, but it’s also around $20 cheaper. I’d say the deciding factor is price and size. If it’s in your budget, the big thing is making sure you have room for this larger-than-average keyboard.

For a good visual, watch the below video. No talking, but he does a good job showing the illumination.

Overall Rating:

Sale Price: $60.99

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The Saitek Eclipse III is a sleek backlit multimedia keyboard with touch-sensitive lighting and volume controls, and ergonomically placed shortcut keys. It features adjustable, multi color backlighting that highlights key controls, touch-sensitive control panel to change settings quickly and easily, two stage height adjustment and removable wrist rest increase comfort, pass through headphone and microphone audio ports for simple connectivity, time-saving Windows and Internet shortcut keys, USB plug and play, and laser-etched, soft touch, durable keys. Color and keyboard settings remain even after system reboot. System requirements are USB 2.0, Windows XP, XP64, Windows Vista (all versions) and Windows 7.