Ideazon Merc Stealth Gaming Keyboard Conclusion

(4.5 star rating) Written by: Justin Whitaker

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Performance

Testing of the Merc Stealth was performed exactly as the designers intended, and exactly as almost all users will use this keyboard --- gaming. Using the Merc Stealth for many hours with some of my favorite first person shooter games (Quake 3, Quake 4, CS: Source) gave me a solid impression of how it holds up during intense frag sessions.

Most of my focus was spent on the gaming pad section of the keyboard. It has a very responsive and tactile feel to the keys. The large movement keys make it easy to play first person shooters with and made it easy to quickly navigate through the various maps I played. I was able to easily reach all of the keys and found the layout natural to my fingers. It did take me some time to get used to the location of the keys – especially the new location of the home, end and arrow keys. I use these keys more during general day-to-day use, and not much at all for gaming. But the extra speed and versatility offered from the game pad more than made up for the learning curve. Also, although I did not take advantage of this feature for FPS games, the programmable keys would be extremely useful for RTS games. The keys allow you to create macros for any sequence of keystrokes in order to speed up your game play.

I also found the microphone/headphone ports and 2 USB ports on the top of the Merc Stealth to be very useful. It is a lot easier to connect USB flash drives, and even your headphones, to the keyboard since it is sitting on top of your desk. This is especially useful for people like me who have their PC underneath their desk where it is not as easy to reach the USB and microphone/headphone ports.

Although the CD was not included with the pre-release version of the keyboard that was sent to me for review, the Merc Stealth does ship with the Z Engine software from Ideazon. It includes more than 125 pre-loaded key layouts and also allows you to create, save, and even share your own keyboard mappings. It also allows you to record macros and assign them to specific keys. Overall, the software is easy to use and a nice added bonus to the keyboard.

Finally, the illuminated keys do help you to find a particular key if you are not able to find it in the dark. However, if you are a touch-typer like I am, the illuminated keys will not be all that useful to you. During any gaming session if I have to stop to look down at the keyboard to find a particular key, I’ve already lost any advantage I had over my opponent. In RTS and FPS game, fast reaction time is essential and you won’t have time to look at the keys on your keyboard. The red, blue or purple backlight looks cool in the dark – and that is the main purpose of the backlighting in my opinion.

Ideazon Merc Stealth Illuminated Gaming Keyboard

The Ideazon Merc Stealth is a fantastic keyboard for gaming, pure and simple. It takes all the things that made the original Merc and Zboard keyboards so popular, and it improves upon them. The solid construction and the backlit key illumination combine to make a keyboard that functions very well for gaming and looks cool while doing it.

However, the layout of the keys will definitely add a bit of a learning curve to anyone used to a standard keyboard layout. After years of using a standard keyboard, it’s hard to break the habit of looking for the home, end, page up/down and arrows keys in a certain spot. This is really the only drawback I found during my many hours of using the keyboard for gaming and general day-to-day use. Additionally, the $89.99 USD cost of the Merc Stealth is higher than other competing gaming keyboards and is much higher than a run-of-the-mill keyboard. The premium you pay is probably worth it to most gamers, though, because are getting exactly what you pay for.

Pros: Cool backlit illumination of keys, custom keypads allow endless flexibility, multimedia and special gaming controls, solid construction.

Cons: Requires a learning curve to become fully acclimated, pricier than other keyboards.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

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