Zowie Celeritas Mechanical Pro Keyboard Review
Peter Donnell / 11 years ago
Final Thoughts
Pricing
The Zowie Celeritas isn’t a cheap keyboard, but there are few mechanical keyboard that are. The cost of a metal internal chassis, as well a full range of mechanical gold plated switches is expensive and if you want that level of accuracy to every key, then you’re going to have to pay a premium for it. The keyboard is currently available in the EU for around 119.99 Euro from Caseking.de. This falls in line with many other mechanical keyboards in terms of price.
Conclusion
Zowie have a really strong contender here and while it doesn’t pack a tonne of features like many other gaming keyboards we’ve seen, it doesn’t fail to impress in terms of performance. I don’t think I would invest in one of these personally, but I can see a multitude of reasons why someone would, I guess it just doesn’t fit my personal taste.
I typically like a keyboard to have full LED back lighting, standalone macro keys, custom profiles and some level of software customisation to accommodate those features. The Zowie has none of this and in many ways that is both what I don’t like about it, and what I love about it. When You are a pro gamer, you could be using multiple computers in a single day, you want something durable, reliable and simple that you can plug and play, then expect the same performance from each and every time, that is what you get with the Zowie Celeritas.
I feel Zowie have gone for the super car ideal that less is more, strip everything down to the basics and then fine tune them to perfection, something that was likely their inspiration to give the keyboard the fastest response time on the market. Your average consumer will not care for this, but in competitive eSports, the factions of seconds can make the difference and I fully understand why some gamers would want the fastest response time (noticeable or not).
Price wise the keyboard is in line with many other mechanical keyboards, many of which even offer more features than this, but if you’re happy to pay the premium for the low response time, then this is the keyboard for you. Build quality is great, performance is superb and the colour choices offered by Zowie look fantastic too. It’s not for me personally, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a great keyboard.
Pros
- Solid build quality
- Choice of MX switches
- Low response time
- Choice of colours
- Removable key-caps
Cons
- No macro functions
- No key-cap removal tool included
“A solid outing from Zowie with an impressive gaming keyboard, but I feel their laser focus on eSports performance may alienate a lot of gamers who want more features rather than more performance, but of course this isn’t the only keyboard Zowie make and it’s great to see they’re providing for this end of the market”
Thank you Caseking.de for providing us with this sample.