Date: May 15, 2007 - Author: Nate Marion
We took a look at Microsoft and Razer's first team effort a few weeks ago with our Habu review. Overall, we were left very impressed. Will we receive the same reaction from the new Reclusa gamers keyboard?
This board appears to be both Microsoft’s effort to target the gaming segment, as well as Razer’s effort to go mainstream. The result of this meeting of the minds is a keyboard with more bling than the usual Microsoft fare, yet with a price tag and feature set that aren’t as extreme as the Razer Tarantula or the Logitech G15 – but is still very good. Let’s find out if this effort to reach a middle ground is worth your cash.
The Reclusa’s main features are as follows (from Razerzone.com):
Let’s get a closer look.
The back of the box touts the features.
Here’s our first peek inside the box. Included is the keyboard itself, the detachable hand rest, and the driver CD.
Here she is all opened up. You can see that there’s another layer of protective plastic over the Microsoft logo bezel. That whole strip along the top is shiny and sleek.
Here you can get a good close look at the programmable keys. They are divided evenly for ambidextrous use, and consist of two programmable jog dials, six programmable hotkeys (the one that look like regular keys) and 4 ‘bumper’ keys on the edges. You can see that they all have default functions like play/pause, copy/paste, forward/back, etc.
The USB ports are located at the top left and right hand corners, and you can see that they are mounted at an angle. These ports function as USB 1.1 ports.
Here we have a shot of the underside of the board, where you can see plenty of channels for routing wires, and the fold out feet. One thing I noted was that the cable channels don’t extend all the way to the USB ports, but I can’t think of many instances where this would be inconvenient. Each clip on the hand rest slips into the keyboard using two nubs that fit into corresponding holes. The clips don’t look or feel that sturdy, so I don’t recommend messing with them too much.
Here’s a quick size comparison with some keyboard I had laying around – some of you may have seen it before. :) The boards are practically the same size both with and without their optional hand rests.
Speaking of hand rests; I have to say that the Reclusa’s hand rest is very nice. Focusing on the gold-plated USB connector allowed me to get a clear shot of the surface texturing here, and the material has a soft, leathery feel to it that I find more comfortable and breathable than plastic, and less likely to cause your hands to sweat.
Here’s the shot most of you want to see. Everything lights up except the jog dials and bumper buttons. The lights are on all the time, and only have one brightness level, but they look good and never became annoying (a-la pulsing Razer logo). The light you see in the top right is the num-lock indicator, which is located underneath the Microsoft logo bezel along with the caps-lock and scroll-lock indicators.
Here you can see the Habu as well. Not a bad looking desktop setup.
For those modders among you who might be wondering how easy it is to change the color of those LEDs, here’s a little disassembly guide for you – although you may not like what you see in the end. You should know that taking this keyboard apart will void your warranty, and that neither Techgage nor myself (nor anybody else, for that matter) can be held responsible for your any damage or malfunction caused by disassembling your Reclusa.
That said, this is going to be pretty easy so even if you’re a ham-fisted klutz who can’t see two feet in front of yourself, you might do ok. All you’ll need is a medium-sized Phillips head screwdriver.
First, here’s another shot of the underside where I’ve marked the location of a hidden screw underneath the Microsoft product ID sticker. Remove this screw and all other visible screws. When removing screws, I always suggest keeping track of where they came from! Plastic baggies are a cheap way to do this. Once they’re all removed, prying open the board should be fairly easy.
Once you get the top of the keyboard off, you’ll be left with this. You can see that all of the LEDs are mounted near the top of the board. The night shot should also help you see that there are two very thing rectangular pieces of Plexiglas inside to help spread the light – the edges extend around the perimeter of the keys and they are split to the right of center. These two pieces of Plexiglas are what we are ultimately trying to get at.
Removing all the visible screws will allow you to move the small PCBs out of the way and lift up the two films that for the key circuits. I have marked the last two screws that need to be removed before the Plexiglas can be removed.
The LED strips have nice little plugs on either side to pass power. I have unplugged these and removed the smaller piece of Plexiglas (which has clips to attach the LED strip). You can also see the front and back of the LED strip. I’ll point out two things here – 1) There won’t be enough room between the LED strip and the edge of the Plexiglas to mount standard round 3mm LEDs, and 2) the LEDs are surface mounted, so soldering new LEDs into place is going to be very hard.
So now you know what the inside of the Reclusa looks like. Now let’s talk about performance and function.
The instruction booklet is about 5 pages and guides you through the process of getting the keyboard up and running. This process consists of plugging in the keyboard, and then inserting the CD and installing the drivers. Installation went without a problem. I’ll note that if you’re using multiple operating systems, you’ll need to have legacy USB support enabled in order to select your OS with the Reclusa. (Owners of the Razer Copperhead and other finicky peripherals will know why I mention this. The Habu works with legacy support enabled.)
Once the drivers are installed, you can access the configuration menu, which is laid out in a fairly intuitive manner, very similar to the Razer Barracuda drivers. The drivers and firmware I’m using are both version 1.00, and are the latest available at the time of review.
This main window is where you can select profiles to edit, keys to program, and the media player program that you want to control. There are also two checkboxes on the lower left, which enable/disable automatic switching between profiles, and enable/disable the onscreen message that is displayed when a profile is changed.
Clicking on the profile selection box opens the lower left window, where you can name up to five profiles and, if you want, tie them to specific .exe files via the navigation window on the lower right. Auto Switching loads the profile for a given .exe when that .exe is started.
The instructions aren’t very clear (read: do not exist) on exactly how some of this works. In order to name a profile or select an .exe to associate it with, you need to highlight the profile (I’ve highlighted profile 2, above) and then double click under ‘Profile Name’ and ‘.Exe’ – you can see that I’ve done this for Profile 1.
This menu also allows users to save profiles to an external source (as a ‘.conf’ file) and load profiles from external sources. This feature is particularly useful for the Reclusa because unlike the Razer Tarantula, the Reclusa doesn’t have any onboard memory – all active profiles are stored in the driver software. There is no limit to the number of profiles you can save externally.
You can program each of the ten keys and two knobs using the menu on the bottom left, which is opened by clicking one of the programmable buttons. This allows you to assign a macro, assign a command from one of two lists (lists shown at bottom center and bottom left), load a saved profile, or launch an .exe file.
One very important thing that I discovered is that no macro can be longer than eight commands, INCLUDING pauses. Some will consider this to be a huge limitation, and I hope that future firmware (if there is upgradeable firmware) and drivers will allow for longer macros.
Each jog dial acts like two of the other programmable keys – one function each for clockwise and counter-clockwise rotation. The right dial defaults to volume control, while the left dial defaults to scroll-up/scroll-down. I found no other quirks with the macro keys and verified that all the keys and knobs worked.
Each profile can also be set to control a media program (selected from the drop-down menu). Since the programmable keys feature defaults for opening a music player, play/pause, etc, this may be useful. I had no trouble with Winamp, WMP or iTunes responding to the keyboard. The jog dials are defaulted to volume control with the media players. The left jog dial controls the media player program volume, while the right jog dial controls overall system volume.
I made profiles for a few different games and tried them out. The only trouble I ran into was with using multiple profiles with multiple STEAM games; specifically, I created a profile for CS:Source (profile 1) and another profile for Dark Messiah (profile 4). Every time I ran either CS:Source or Dark Messiah (or any other program that starts STEAM, for that matter) I’d get a notification that profile 1 was loaded, and about one second later, a notification that profile 4 was loaded. During the game it was always clear that profile 4 was always being used for STEAM games.
The easiest was around this is to disable auto-switching a just select the profile you want before starting a STEAM game. You can also use the hot keys to load specific profiles (more details below), so another trick would be to program the left jog dial (for instance) to load the previous/next profile – in all 5 profiles. That way you could disable auto-switching and dial in profile you want any time.
The only trouble with this is that the onscreen notification doesn’t show up during games (at least, not during the ones that I played) so if you switch profiles during a game, you’ll need to pay a little extra attention. Other than that there weren’t any problems with the auto-switch feature, and the onscreen notification is useful outside of games.
I've covered the software, so I’ll give you my subjective impressions of the board. The key action is good, and is very similar to other Microsoft keyboards you may have used, without excessive play or travel in the keys.
This keyboard is equipped with ‘Hyperesponse technology’, which is a fancy term for increased USB polling rate for lower response time. Unlike with Razer mice drivers, there is no option to set the USB frequency with this keyboard, which to me is unimportant since I could not detect any difference in latency between the Reclusa and the G15.
Some keyboards like the Razer Tarantula are designed so that many keys can be pressed simultaneously and all of the commands will be sent properly – Razer markets this as their ‘Anti-ghosting feature’ on the Tarantula. Most USB keyboards can only properly transmit about 6 keys at once, depending on how the keys are mapped.
Anti-ghosting is not listed as one of the Reclusa’s features, but I’m the optimistic type, so I used a free trial version of keyboard test to try to determine how many keys I could press simultaneously on the Reclusa. Unfortunately, my testing indicated that no more than six keys could be pressed at one time effectively, and in some cases even less depending on the keys that were pressed.
I verified my results in F.E.A.R. using W-A-S-D keys for movement. I found that if I were leaning left (Q) while moving forward (W), I could not also move side to side (A or D) or jump (Space). That is only one example but suffice it to say that the key traces of this keyboard appear to be designed like any other USB keyboard.
Personally, I can’t be too upset by this discovery since there are very few other keyboards available that register more than 6 keys at once (the Logitech G15 is not one of them), and I didn’t experience any undue limitations in my control – the Reclusa performs like any other USB keyboard in this respect.
The aesthetics are good, (although I think blue in general is a little overdone – how about some red?). The backlight is bright yet pleasant and the hand rest is comfortable. I’m not a huge fan of the large Microsoft logo bezel at the top though – it takes up a lot of space yet doesn’t serve any function, and while it looks sleek, it also attracts dust.
Overall I think the Reclusa is a good keyboard, and I’m pleased that there were no big issues with the 1.00 drivers or firmware. While the eight-command limit on macros is a big disappointment, the Reclusa’s feature set is very strong at its price point, and future driver releases (or, dare I say it, hacks?) may eliminate the macro issue.
I think that the Reclusa would be an excellent value for a gamer that doesn’t already have a board with macro key functionality, and would also like a little bling without breaking the bank.
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