Tesoro Excalibur Spectrum Keyboard Review

Introduction

Tesoro are back on eTeknix once again! While we looked at their gorgeous new Lobera Spectrum recently, today we take a look at something a little further up the range, the new Excalibur Spectrum. RGB keyboards are all the rage recently, they’re often still the same keyboard they were last year in terms of performance and features, with the new addition of some funky lighting effects; no bad thing for those who love to customise their setup.

As you can see from the spec, the Excalibur is a fairly standard size keyboard, it features multiple profiles, built-in memory, RGB lighting and more.

“Tesoro Excalibur is a mechanical keyboard with an advanced backlighting processor. Unlike the original Excalibur which is capable of recording and storing macros, Spectrum also has a number of stunning illumination modes. Using this keyboard is a lot of colorful fun. Excalibur is the first Tesoro keyboard to have a classic solid look. It can be used with a gaming rig as well as on an office desk due to its straight and strong lines. The supreme spectrum backlighting, however, adds more color to our guy. Each key’s color can be set individually, the illumination will react to keystrokes, change colors in different ways, and do other crazy things.”

The packaging for the Excalibur Spectrum is simple enough, giving us a nice and colourful image of the keyboard on the front of the box.

The Excalibur comes hard-wired and you’ll be happy to hear it features a durable braided cable with a gold-plated connector.

The general design of the keyboard is nothing revolutionary. We’ve got a fairly standard chassis size, black plastic trim and a standard key layout.

The key caps look nice and smart, with a custom laser etched font to allow for the built-in lighting effects.

Here you can see we have the Kailh Red switches; it is also available in blue and brown switch.

A full-size number pad, nothing particularly interesting, but it’s all there.

The Excalibur can be switched from 6-key to n-key rollover directly from the keyboards using Fn-Shift + Ins and Del keys

The arrow keys also double up as lighting controls, allowing you to tweak things such as brightness and contrast.

There’s five built-in profiles on the keyboard, which are great for storing lighting effects.

Windows lock, as well as master volume controls.

Plus a basic set of multimedia controls; perfect for flicking through some music while you’re working or gaming.

As I said before, the keyboard is hard-wired with a thick braided cable. The cable is mounted off-center, which should help reduce conflicts with your monitor stand.

The underside of the keyboard is relatively featureless, aside from four rubber grips that will help prevent it from sliding around your desk.

There are two kickstands on the base, although they’re pretty standard and that’s a real shame, as most mechanical keyboards has stronger ones with rubber grips of their own.