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Microsoft's new keyboard
Topic Started: Wednesday Feb 3 2010, 09:52 PM (102 Views)
NecrisTEWQ
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an, we wish Microsoft would get its story straight. We thought the whole old fashioned "use a keyboard" approach was dead, submerged under a flood of motion sensors, touchscreens and speech recognition tech. Even CEO Steve Ballmer was spruiking the notion of NUI - natural user interfaces.

Well, now that the dreamy stargazing is over it's back to business it seems. So coming this March there's going to be the next attempt at beating Logitech's G15 a new badass keyboard in town. When you're flogging a device like a keyboard to gamers, you need more than just "it has all the letters of the alphabet, even the ones nobody likes" as a sales pitch. So this time around, when pimping the SideWinder X4, Microsoft has gone for "anti-ghosting".


Picture cropped so we don't give away what the rest of the X4 looks like


"Ghosting, the graphic effect on latency prone LCD screens" you ask? Wrong. The much more insidious problem of detecting all keypresses when you're mashing away frantically. Apparently, this is a problem for some gamers. Here's the pitch:
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The Applied Sciences Group, an interdisciplinary research and development team that works across the Microsoft Entertainment & Devices Division doing applied research for Microsoft Hardware, Microsoft Surface and Xbox 360, developed the anti-ghosting technology with gamers in mind. The advanced technology takes anti-ghosting to the next level by allowing gamers to press up to 26 keys at once. Because each key is scanned independently by the keyboard hardware, each key press is correctly detected regardless of how many other keys are being pressed at the same time. The SideWinder X4 Keyboard excels where other keyboards fail, letting users execute key combinations and taking full advantage of their skill and speed.

“We’re always looking for new and novel ways to enhance people’s interactions with their PCs,” said Steven Bathiche, research manager of the Applied Sciences Group at Microsoft. “We know that ghosting can be a problem for gamers, so we wanted to develop a way to eliminate this issue and improve the overall gaming experience, and we’ve succeeded with the new anti-ghosting technology in the SideWinder X4 Keyboard.”



All this time you thought you were bad at games - but all that was holding you back was your ghosty keyboard. Gamer friendly inclusions like macro support, adjustable backlighting and profile switching are also making the grade. No LCD mini-screen from what we can see however.

This will run you 60 clams in the US when it goes on sale in March. Local pricing is yet to be announced, but $70 for a keyboard with full profile and macro support sounds about fair to us. Especially if it gets rid of that pesky ghost problem we never knew we had.


OMG!!! All those times the keyboard wouldn't work properly when i used my hands, feet, AND have a mate pressing even more buttons for me at once, i cant believe they finally made a keyboard to FINALLY fix that issue :lol2:

Doesn't even look all that flash TBH

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Edited by NecrisTEWQ, Wednesday Feb 3 2010, 09:54 PM.
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JAMSIN
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Logitech G19 (I think it is) is better, looks really nice.

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Has a colour LCD to show stuff if a game is supported.


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