Drop’s latest mechanical keyboards are love letters to The Lord of the Rings - The Verge
Drop is releasing a pair of Lord of the Rings-themed keyboards: a gray Dwarvish board and a green Elvish counterpart. Both retail for $199, and Drop hopes to ship both by late September or early October.
A little under a year after Drop released a pair of keycap sets themed around the Elvish and Dwarvish languages from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the mechanical keyboard retailer is following it up with two full-on keyboards. There’s a gray Dwarvish board and a green Elvish counterpart, both of which are available fully assembled and ready to go out of the box. Both retail for $169, with preorders opening today, and Drop hopes to ship both by early October. I’ve been testing out the Elvish version over the last couple of days.
Aside from the keycaps themselves, which feature regular Latin characters alongside their fantasy equivalents, both keyboards also include small Tolkien-esque illustrations above their arrow clusters. But I like the fact that there are no visible logos or obnoxious Lord of the Rings branding. Instead, there are a simple pair of wordmarks visible on the underside of the keyboard (next to a pair of flip-out feet for height adjustment) but nothing you’re going to see during regular use.
Select keys feature illustrations rather than Elvish.
The keycaps themselves use the so-called “Training” designs, which explains the presence of traditional Latin legends. That means you won’t have to literally learn Dwarvish or Elvish to use these keyboards, but the bad news is that the fantasy symbols replace the secondary legends most keyboards use. So it’s easy enough to tell the “4” key from the “3” key, but I sometimes forgot which I needed for “#” and which was “$.”
Rating: 5