Keycap is an extremely important component on the keyboard, it shows the personality of each player and makes the overall keyboard of yours more unique and high-end. However, just looking at the color of the Keycap is not enough, what makes a good keycap is the keycap material and keycap printing technology. So what is keycap printing technology? You should choose the keycap with the best printing technology for your keyboard.
1. Pad printing
This is the most popular keycap printing method since the 1990s, using a silicon rubber pad dipped in ink and then printed onto the keycap. Nowadays, almost every device that uses character printing uses the pad printing method.
This technology is often used on cheap keyboards, not very durable, and the letters are easily faded.
2. Laser printing
This is a technology that uses a laser beam to print characters onto the surface of the keycaps. Laser printing works very well for drawing straight lines, but has difficulty filling in areas of color neatly, such as arrowheads. Companies that use laser printing include Apple, Cherry, and Matias.
3. Laser color shooting, laser ink injection into keycaps
Laser technology is used to change the appearance of keycaps with little impact on the surface texture. Light keycaps can be darkened and dark keycaps can be lightened. Traditionally, lasering a dark keycap would result in light gray or grayish-yellow characters. However, recent advances in technology have made it possible to print white characters on black keycaps. Matias applies this new printing technology to their Quiet Pro series, WASD and QWERkeys can also provide laser-etched keycaps with white characters on a black background.
4. Dye-sublimation (thermal printing technology - uses heat to put ink into keycaps)
Dye-sub printing is done by using heat to penetrate the dye deep into the keycap. This is the biggest difference between dye-sub printing and regular printing, the regular printing method creates a layer of paint on the surface of the plastic while dye-sub printing makes the dye penetrate deep into the plastic. Dye-sub was a popular method for printing keycaps in the 80s and 90s. Once the ink has penetrated deep into the plastic, it will not fade or fade like regular paint, it is also unlike laser printing, printing multiple colors with dye-sub technology is quite easy.
However, compared to pad-printing or laser-etching, dye-sub printing is much more expensive, and the limitation of dye-sub printing is that the dye must be darker than the material used for printing. This means that you cannot print text on black keycaps (because there is no color darker than black) or you cannot print white text on keycaps (because there is no color lighter than white).
5. Double shot injection molded keycaps
Often referred to as double-shot, this is considered the best type of keycap. Instead of printing the character on the keycap, the character is molded and cast in colored plastic, while the rest of the keycap is molded around the character in a different colored plastic. The advantage of this method is that the character on the keycap will never fade, and double-shot keycaps also create high color contrast because the color of the character is not affected by the color of the keycap surface. Double-shot keycaps were the standard in the 70s and early 80s. However, they were expensive to produce and lacked flexibility because each character required a separate mold to produce.
Double-shot keycaps are limited to 2 colors per keycap, although triple-shot or even quadruple-shot keycap molds are still produced, but the cost is too high and the manufacturing process is very complicated. Many manufacturers often use pad-printing or dye-sub to add additional colors to double-shot keycaps.
6. Engraving
The characters are machine engraved and then the grooves are painted. This method is not widely used, usually for handmade or custom products. Companies that use machine engraved keycaps include RAFI and QWERkeys. A major drawback of this method is that dirt will stick to the grooves, making it difficult to clean.
