Logitech G19 Programmable Gaming Keyboard with Color Display

First let me confess to being a bit of a Logitech fan. Their products have, for the most part, treated me very well over the years and so has their customer service.Let me get down to the reason I have two of this keyboard. On one fateful day I decided to remove all of the keys on the keyboard and one by one clean them out and give the keyboard a thorough cleaning using a few qtips and a bowl of water. The reason for the thorough cleaning was because I accidentally spilled a can of soda in the keyboard. The spilling incident itself did not damage the keyboard as the very little that managed to get under the plastic of the keyboard ended up on the rubber padding. Nay, what did it was the water that was left in the keys and managed to seep down to the circuitry below because I didn't wait long enough for them to thoroughly dry. A funny story, but tragic indeed.So I waited, the keyboard went on sale, and I snagged another one. What do I love about this keyboard? Well, the keys feel very nice, for the most part. They have a bit of a squish to them, but not too much. This is nice because it makes the keyboard very quiet. I prefer my keyboards to be quiet rather than loud and clicky like that of a mechanical keyboard. The illuminated portion of it is absolutely awesome. There are so many colors to choose from that I have never actually seen on an illuminated keyboard. Dark purples, oranges, and light greens, even pink! Also the fact that it sports two powered USB 2.0 ports is very convenient. I actually use them for my Tablet and Mouse. The volume dial is really cool, feels nice and it's not overly sensitive making it easy to slightly lower or heighten the volume.There is a ton of customization and profiles you can set up if you are a hardcore gamer, I haven't taken too much advantage of this, I should, but I haven't. The only major downside to this keyboard is the screen.The screen is cool, and it looks nice, but it is so very limited in what it can do. The youtube function if it is pretty much worthless seeing as I can't search for videos I might actually want to watch. However, for games that fully support it, it's really cool.The most notable game I can give that supports it is League of Legends and the support seems to be fairly new as one day it just started popping up on the screen. It even, while loading, shows the League of Legends logo and changes the keyboards color to blue! Pretty cool right? I thought it was. The nice thing about it is that it gives me all of the information on my champion. So I can quickly glance down and see certain bits of important information without having to pull up anything on the main game screen. The advantages are small, but sometimes that's all it takes is a small advantage, right?For most other games I honestly can't think of why the screen would be necessary, League of Legends is probably the only one I know of that does it right. However, there are some programs that work with it as well.One of them is EVGA Precision, a graphics card tweaking and monitoring program. I used these features to show my fan speeds, temperatures, and clock speeds while overclocking to ensure I can safely overclock without hitting a certain temperature threshold. That, too, works quite well as I can have this appearing on that screen rather than on one of my monitors.I would like to see more features like that, seeing as I can quickly slip through them on the keyboard navigation rather than doing anything on screen, so if I do happen to be playing a game I can flip between background programs using the keyboard.All I can say is that this keyboard is really good, it just needs more support for the incredible potential it has, and has had since the G15 made its debut.On a side note, to some people, like me, the keyboard may look like it's massive. It's not, it's a good bit smaller than the original G15 (G11) keyboard and might be about the same size as the current G15, I'm not certain.

I guess it's about time I wrote a review. I've owned this piece of hardware for about 10 months now, and I must say I am very, very satisfied with it. I, like some of you out there, am a very fast typist. Previously on my laptop keyboard I could push 80+ WPM easily. Once I got this in, I immediately could type upwards of 100+ WPM without breaking a sweat. The key layout is so incredibly comfortable and natural for my hands, it's ridiculous. I love it. The response of the keyboard, everything, is like it was made for me. If I could only use one keyboard for the rest of my life, it would be this one, hands down. Everything on it is amazing. Everything.I don't ever use the macro keys on the side so I can't speak for their usefulness. I do, however, utilize my keyboard screen for two things: one, to see the title of a song I am listening to in iTunes or to see how much time is left in it (saves me from alt+tabbing if it's just sitting on the screen), and Ventrilo. I definitely use the screen for Ventrilo most of all. It is incredibly convenient, if you're in-game and want to see the username of the person chatting, you just look down on your keyboard and it tells you. It also keeps their name on the screen for an extra second, in red, after transmitting, which is nice also. It also displays recent events (like "user" has connected, disconnected, changed channels, etc.) It's incredibly useful. If you're an admin of your ventrilo, you can also do things like kick and ban and mute players, although I've never used that specific feature. If I want to ban someone I don't think I would do it from my keyboard. Ever have someone drop into your vent for a second and leave and you wanted to know who it was? This keyboard tells you. So, to summarize, this screen was practically designed for Ventrilo. It is incredibly nice to have.I like how I have the option of shutting off the lights and screen on the keyboard just by pressing a button. If I'm going out to lunch, to work, whatever, I just press the button and it turns off. Very nice to have in case you're one of those people, like me, who likes to have all the lights off when leaving for an extended amount of time.You can set the display color of the keyboard to whatever RGB value you want, which is very nice. I just use the default green, because it seems to match the keyboard and my setup nicely. You can use whatever color you can dream up in your head though. It's awesome.iTunes is nice with the play/pause, back, backward and forward buttons on the top right. I use them frequently when I don't feel like alt+tabbing and just want to skip to the next song, or if I want to pause the music really quick to hear someone's quiet voice in ventrilo. This entire keyboard was made for convenience, I swear.There are some TINY issues with this keyboard. For one, my volume scroll doesn't work, never has. I don't know if I need to enable it in options or something, but I've just never bothered with it because I just don't care about it, really. I would never get into the habit of using it so it's basically useless to me. It looks nice though. The only other con is the button that looks like a little gear near the bottom left of the screen is off-center with the backlight, but seriously, who cares about that? Not me. Definitely not enough to warrant knocking a star and barely worth mentioning.I love this keyboard. Definitely one of the best purchases in my setup. If you find yourself in the realm of spending this much money on a keyboard, go for it. Either this one or the new "g19s" model, although I can't speak to the usefulness of that product because I have not used it.Buy this.