We’re going to check out Ant Esports MK1200 Mini, and this is a 60% Mechanical Keyboard with Colorful LED backlighting, and 60% keyboards have not been easy to get in India for a low price so the price tag of 2000 Rs. on this can be quite attractive.
DESIGN
The design of the MK1200 Mini is pretty standard when it comes to 60% keyboards. It is very compact with a very minimal footprint on your desk,
but it is made quite well and it feels durable with the strong plastics used in its construction.
The keyboard comes with a detachable cable, which is braided, and because it is USB type C, you can also use a Type C to Type C cable to connect it to a smartphone or a laptop.
The keyboard is backlit with colorful LEDs, but these are not RGB LEDs, and they only have fixed colors.
I personally really think that if a brand is going to have fixed color LEDs on their keyboards, they should really go for a single color as that looks way more classier and mature than random colors that cannot be changed,
but Ant Esports at least didn’t get something with with full rainbow spectrum, and you have 5 different colors which don’t look that bad.
You also have different effects on this, which you can directly change from the keyboard. We have some regular breathing and static effects, and there are also some reactive effects, and you can change the brightness of the LEDs and control the speed of the animated effects.
The font on the keycaps looks fine for the price, but the quality and feel of the keycaps is actually pretty great as they are made of double shot ABS plastic.
SWITCHES
It comes with Blue Clicky Mechanical Switches, but I don’t know who made these, as it just says YH on these switches, and I wasn’t able to find more information about that.
The feel on these switches however is pretty good, being a clicky switch, you hear that click clack on these that a lot of people love. The typing experience is quite enjoyable, and if this is going to be your first mechanical keyboard, then you are really going to get a pretty good feel of why people love these.
This is only available in Blue clicky switches for now, and even though my preferred switches are the red linear ones, a lot of people also prefer the tactile feeling of the blues, especially for typing.
This keyboard in particular doesn’t require a lot of force for actuating its keys, so I don’t mind it as much, even for gaming this can be good, and it is definitely going to be a huge upgrade from any membrane keyboard.
Now this product may seem a bit familiar to my old viewers, because I have reviewed a very similar looking keyboard from Banggood earlier, which was the Royal Kludge RK61 RGB Bluetooth Keyboard.
But the RK61 comes at almost double the price of the MK1200 Mini without customs, and even though Bluetooth connectivity and full RGB keys are really nice to have, you just can’t order it from China these days, and the typing experience between both the keyboards is identical, so if you wanted to buy the RK61 and use it in wired mode, you can basically get that now for half the price.
The footprint on the desk is quite small, so this can be really great for people who just need a keyboard for gaming so they can have a lot of space to move their mouse and sit in a more centered position. But because we have a limited number of keys on it, you have to use the function button on the lower right corner to access the secondary functions that are printed on the keys.
So to press home, you’ll have to press Function + J, and for Closing a program, you’ll have to press Alt + Function + F4.
But you can also switch the layer mode, which means that if you press Function + Left Control, the secondary functions on the buttons will activate with a single press, so you can directly press Alt and the F4 key to close a program.
This also means that pressing keys like H, J and K will activate Insert, Home, and Page Up, instead of typing H, J and K, which isn’t something that you may always want, which takes us to the one layer mode that this keyboard lacks in comparison to the RK61, which had 3 layer modes.
In the 3rd extra layer mode on the RK61, the alphabets keys worked normally, but only the top number row activated function keys with a single press. So this way you could easily work in programs which require you to press function keys frequently, while also having the alphabet keys working normally.
This isn’t that big of a deal, but it does limit the ease of use slightly.
The MK1200 Mini does have the arrow key mode, so instead of always requiring to press right control and alt with function keys to activate the arrow keys, you can press Function + Enter, and this will make the arrow keys activate with a single press, so if you want to play a game with arrow keys, you can do that.
CONCLUSION
So overall, the Ant Esports MK1200 Mini is a really good 60% mechanical keyboard for its price of 2000 Rs., even though I don’t like the fixed color LEDs of different colors, it doesn’t look bad, and more importantly, the typing and gaming experience is pretty good, and the small footprint can make this a great option for gamers.
A 60% form factor can be unnecessarily complicated for desktop use, but if you don’t find yourself using function keys that often because you mostly play games or do casual stuff on your PC, then this is a pretty good minimalistic option.
Red linear switches on it would have also been my preferred choice, but I have also used blues and browns for gaming, and I didn’t have any issues with those.
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