Reviewed: Amazon's £23 mechanical gaming keyboard

Mechanical keyboards used to be super expensive. When Twitch and esports rose to prominence at the start of the last decade, kicking off a wave of interest in these mechanical marvels, the only options out there were Japanese imports built around German-made Cherry MX switches. These boards delivered a rock-solid typing and gaming experience, but even the cheapest examples cost upwards of £100 here in the UK. That's a ton of money to spend on a peripheral, but the high cost of each mechanical switch - around £1, with 105 keys needed - meant that manufacturers and retailers alike only made a tiny profit on each unit sold.

Since then, the original Cherry switches have been joined by a sea of imitators working to similar blueprints, bringing down the cost of mechanical keyboards at a rapid pace. Today we reach a new standard of affordability, as Amazon's Basics line has expanded to include a genuine full-fat, full-size mechanical keyboard that changes its price regularly, but at its lowest retails for just over £20. This is our review of the Amazon Basics Programmable Mechanical Gaming Keyboard - and after a week, we're impressed.

At £22.67 including shipping, the Amazon Basics keyboard cost me about £100 less than the first mechanical keyboard I ever bought, a Japanese-made Filco Majestouch-2. That Filco was built like an absolute tank and felt fantastic to type on after a life of mushy membrane keyboards, but it had a pretty short feature list - just 105 mechanical, plate-mounted switches beneath tasteful plastic keycaps, with nary a secondary function or RGB backlight in sight.

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