How would you rate your keyboards?

[brickviking]

Subjectively, the feel and the look of a calculator keyboard are two different things for me. Here's (roughly) how I rate my calculator keyboards.

• fx-82 TL: Fairly crisp feel, reasonably clear legends. My only real issue is that some of the keys are a little small, and are all loose in their sockets (common to all my Casios).
• fx-82MS: Mushy feel, key caps have definitely aged, but legends are mostly still pretty readable. There's less clutter due to Casio moving some stuff into menus instead of displaying them on the fascia.
• fx-9750g+, (white fascia): the gold legends have almost the right contrast against the white shell. Almost. The keys feel very crisp in some places with a distinct stop at the bottom of the key travel, a little mushy in other places. They're also pretty close to each other, and the four cursor keys are one "sort-of-circular with four knobs" lump of plastic instead of being separate.
• fx-9750gII, (dark blue fascia): All the legends are very easy to read against the background. The keys feel very crisp, like the G+. They're also pretty close to each other, and the four cursor keys are one circular lump of plastic instead of being separated. Hm.
• Canon F-804P: Absolutely the worst fascia design I've used. The legends are very hard to read against the mid-grey they decided to use, and the keys are almost all the same size; tiny.
• HP 50G (charcoal fascia): keys feel very crisp like my Casio 9750s, but with a very distinct click at the bottom of the key travel. The keys aren't loose in their sockets at all even though they're small. The legends on the fascia are even clearer than on my 9750gII, and they've somehow managed to avoid the "cluttered" look. Thank goodness the cursor keys are all separate, it makes much more sense to me.
  

Now my comment on the HP 34C (that I used to have): very distinct keyboard with an almost harsh click to actuate. The one I had was still very stiff, and I was prone to not fully pressing down the key to get it to register, at least initially. The two switches were definitely showing their age, sometimes registering a change, sometimes not. The key legends were helped by having a distinct front face (much like the 41C/CV/CX), though the three shift keys were an attempt to expose almost every function to the user. I felt that the tan legends could have had slightly more contrast against the back, but it was still readable if I wasn't flooded by light. The black legends on the key fronts were harder to read due to the size of the print.

I used to have one of the Sharp PC-1247 BASIC calculators, and that had its own QWERTY keyboard with a somewhat spongy feel to the alphanumeric keys though the legends were generally easy to read.

Here endeth my babble...

(Post 197)