Mechanical keyboards are brilliant. If you agree, you probably have one on your desk right now – and we have just the deal for you. SteelSeries’ PrismCaps are an awesome upgrade over your stock keycaps, offering high-quality PBT construction, backlit legends and a beautiful two-tone ‘pudding cup’ design that looks great, especially with an RGB keyboard.
Normally a full keycap set of PrismCaps will cost you $30, but as an early Black Friday deal you can find these keycaps for 50% off – just $15. At that price, these are in impulse buy territory for me, as they’ll provide an immediate uplift over your existing keycaps and last for decades.
These keycaps are offered in an ANSI (US) layout, but with a few extra keys that make them compatible with almost all mechanical keyboards made by popular gaming brands like Corsair, Razer, SteelSeries and so on. Basically anything that uses Cherry MX-style stems will work, from full-size boards to more compact TKL, 65% and 60% examples – as long as they don’t take too many liberties with the layout.
So what are pudding keycaps anyway? The basic idea is that while the tops of the keycaps are produced as normal, with opaque black or white save for the legends where backlighting shines through, the sides are left translucent, allowing diffuse light to spill forth. This makes it an awesome way to highlight your keyboard’s lighting, whether you’ve gone for the all-out rainbow wave or a more restrained set of colours and effects. I personally love these keycaps even with the lighting turned off, as the two-tone look really appeals.
There are a few vendors that offer similar pudding caps on Amazon, but not all of them are great quality options – and few are offered in both black and white colourways, as SteelSeries’ are. I’ve tested out these very keycaps on my own keyboards, and they’ve held up through years of regular use requiring nothing more than a wash in dish soap every few years to remove the built-up grime.
All in all, these are an awesome pickup for $15, and well worth considering if you want to upgrade the look and feel of your mechanical keyboard!