OCZ Sabre OLED Gaming Keyboard

Move over, Optimus. OCZ hacks down the price on OLED keyboards with a more practical model.


OCZ Sabre Oled Gaming KeyboardThe dream of a keyboard with customizable OLED keys that change to anything you want lives on. Though our experience with the very first OLED keyboard soured us a bit to the idea (and if you actually bought an Optimus Maximus, put you out $1,877), other companies are starting to take Art Lebedev’s lofty aspiration and distill it down into something practical.

OCZ Technology’s Sabre keyboard follows the same concept, but makes a number of compromises to bring the price down. Rather than offering a full slate of OLED keys – most of which you’re just going to want to be letters anyway – OCZ has tacked on a grid of nine to the left-hand side of any otherwise normal keyboard. And in another move to cut cost, they’re all monochrome amber OLEDs, unlike the Maximus’ full-color ones. Even so, you can choose any image you want to fill a given key, from a BioRifle for Unreal Tournament to an arc-drawing tool for Autodesk Inventor.

Short of the OLED keys, the Sabre also features a tough rubber coating on its other keys that should allow them to last for over 5 million cycles, blue LED sidelighting, and adjustable tilt.

How much will gamers have to plunk down to lay their fingers on glowing amber array of limitless possibility? Between $138 and $180, depending on the retailer. Check out OCZ Technology for more information.

OCZ Sabre OLED Gaming Keyboard

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  1. unimpressedWithSabre at 11:32pm 23rd September 2010 with current (and only) available drivers, the OLEDs have a built in 'screensaver' of 3 minutes. Its a feature confirmed by OCZ on their forums to prevent the OLEDs frmo burning out. so if you're wanting to use the OLEDs for say a Flight Sim and dont touch any of the OLEDs for 3 minutes, they will all go blank/off. If you press one of the OLEDs, they will all come on again, but you will invoke the associated function of the pressed OLED button in the process - which is undesirable unless you keep one of the OLEDs dedicated to waking all the OLEDs up...which means you really only have 8 OLEDs to play with. This 'screensaver' only occurs AFTER installing the drivers. Of course you need to install the drivers to setup your own icons on the OLEDs. Shonky retailers, such as Computer Alliance (Brisbane), might inform you that the OLEDs stay on all day - but they havent (and wont) installed the drivers and setup application specific profiles.
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