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Razer Huntsman V3 HE Review: Jumping on the Bandwagon
It finally happened. After years of standing by optical switch technology, Razer has finally jumped on the bandwagon and made its own Hall Effect keyboard.
Razer still stands by its optical switches, at least according to its PR representatives. In the eyes of Razer’s engineers, optical switch technology is still superior to magnetic switches. According to Razer, an optical switch still has greater accuracy and is less likely to face interference from outside forces (such as electromagnetic fields or a metal desk). But, apparently, the demand for magnets has become so strong that Razer simply can’t ignore customer demand anymore. As a result, Razer’s first Hall Effect keyboard, the Hunstman V3 HE, came into existence.
Being its first attempt, Razer didn’t try to do anything crazy. No screens, dials, or split spacebars. Instead, it offers a simple and basic Hall Effect keyboard that does exactly what it says on the box. And, as much as I like the new and bizarre, sometimes that’s all a keyboard needs to be.
The most important part of a keyboard will always be how the keys actually feel during use. In this regard, the Hunstman V3 HE is merely fine. The switches are smooth when pressed, and the smoothness is consistent across most of the keys. Though some switches feel slightly overlubed, to the extent that the bottom-out of the keystroke feels mildly tacky. Because this keyboard uses a tray-mount system, there are also slight differences in the stiffness across the keys: switches closer to mounting screws will feel less flex when typing, and vice versa. The typing experience has multiple slight differences across keys that make it feel inconsistent, but these aren’t major enough to be irritating—or even particularly noticeable—during regular use.
Each switch has a 40-gram spring, which feels comparable in weight to a Cherry MX Red when typing. They’re reasonably light and have limited wobble, but are slightly slow to return after being pressed. It’s not a major issue, they still return relatively quickly, but a more snappy spring would have been preferable.
The typing sound can best be described as relatively “clacky,” with a clean, full tone and a significant midrange. The sound is clean overall, without any extraneous scratchiness, pinging, or other odd frequencies. There are noticeable differences in tone across the keys, especially on some of the outer ones, which end up taking on a noticeably deeper and duller sound. Compared with the rattly and atonal optical Huntsman V3, these improvements are night and day. But compared with the gasket-mounted Razer BlackWidow V4, there’s definitely still room to improve.
The spacebar poses the largest issue, in both sound and feel. There are two strips of foam on the underside of it to prevent a hollow sound when typing. While this does work, it also results in a lower “thump” noise that’s significantly deeper than any of the other keys. More important, because the foam strips on my unit are too close to the switch underneath, they collide with the housing when pressed down and make the end of the keystroke feel distinctly squishy and muted. The spacebar is also significantly heavier than any other key, weighing nearly 10 grams (comparatively, a standard spacebar is around 7 grams, while a standard single-unit keycap is around 1.5). This makes the switch feel noticeably lighter than the others, and at lower actuation distances, this can even result in some mis-inputs.
I found that swapping out the spacebar for a nondampened one (thankfully, it’s a standard 6.25-unit length, which is incredibly easy to find) results in an improved keypress and a sound that’s far more in line with the rest of the keys, as opposed to the distinctly deeper tone it produces out of the box. For those OK with a more destructive fix, it would also be easy to remove the foam from the original spacebar.
Conversely, the stabilizers on this keyboard are issue-free. All of them are smooth and quiet with zero