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CES 2013: Roccat Gaming Ryos Keyboard

by: Sean Cahill -
More On: CES 2013
CES 2013 is in full swing, and appointments have officially started here in Las Vegas.  My Tuesday started out at the Las Vegas Hotel to visit with the good people from Roccat.  Last year, Roccat made their North American debut at CES with a solid line of products.  This year, there were two primary products in focus:  The Ryos Keyboard and the Power Grid.

RYOS KEYBOARD

The meat and potatoes of the visit focused on Roccat's first mechanical keyboard, the Ryos.  Bearing a very similar look to the Isku from Roccat, the Ryos is designed to be more customizable than any other keyboard available.  As with most keyboards today, all of the keys are illuminated, but are also changeable based upon the user's preferences and current needs.  For instance, if a user is currently operating Adobe Photoshop, a change in the macro will illuminate specific editing keys that the program uses.  Of course, it wouldn't be proper to have this feature without really having it in mind for gamers.  Various settings are available to illuminate the standard keys used in games, such as the WASD keys for movement, macro keys, and so on.  The macro keys on the left hand side, upon pressing them, will also show the keys on the primary keyboard that are already coded, that way a gamer won't forget which one he or she set up for a specific macro.  Little things make a good product that much better.

The spec-sheet for the Ryos Keyboard is as follows
- Per-key illuminated mechanical keyboard with 113 keys
- Advanced anti-ghosting with N-key rollover
- Choice of four CHERRY MX key switches
- 3 programmable thumbster keys
- 5 programmable macro keys
- 94 other programmable keys
- 1000 hz polling rate, 1 ms response time
- 1.8m rear-exit braided cable
- 1 x audio in, 1 x audio out, 2 x USB 2.0 ports
- 2MB on-board memory
- Two 32-bit ARM Cortex Processors


MSRP for the three models, the Pro, the Glow, and the standard MK, are $149.99, $129.99, and $99.99 respectively.

Expected release date is April 2013.