Keyboard Switch Testers Are Underrated

With all of the guides that exist out there on how to modify, build, and customize mechanical keyboards, there’s not really all that many questions left that a new hobbyist could ask that there aren’t answers out there for already. Basically anything sold by a keyboard vendor is either self-explanatory or has a slew of videos or articles backing up why you should or could benefit from buying x, y, or z product. Or, at the bare minimum, there’s enough information out there to justify why those companies are selling it at that price in the first place. That is, however, with one exception I see passed over time and time again – switch testers or samplers.

Now while I am a bit biased as I’ve purchased many different switch testers over my years of being in the hobby, I genuinely believe that these are one of the most under-utilized and misunderstood keyboard related items that all enthusiasts in the hobby should seek out. I know that they may seem a bit expensive for what they offer at first glance, or you may think that just one single switch is not enough for you to form an opinion on a whole board of them, but I promise you that switch testers/samples are significantly more valuable than you think they are. Here’s why you should go buy a switch tester (or two) today, even if you aren’t new to the hobby!

Somewhere around 7-8 years ago, I started out my journey into the keyboard world by buying a 63-option switch tester as I was genuinely trying to explore all of the options that existed out there before I bought my second, much more “real” keyboard. (My first “not real” keyboard being an Anne Pro V1 with Gateron Browns.) Back then, those 63 switches covered a pretty significant number of the options that existed out there in the day, and even so much so that there were a lot of repeats of highly similar switches like Cherry’s MX Red, Gateron’s Red, Kailh’s Red, etc in my tester. However, as time has progressed over the years, the number of switches has grown seemingly exponentially from those options. As of the time of writing this article, I have over 50 times that amount of different modern, MX-style switches and even as a collector I struggle to keep up with the variety.

Since there’s now over 3,000 different switches out there, switch testers don’t offer a full potential trial of everything out there but rather serve as a curated, hand selected set of good offerings that a vendor has put together for you to try. They’ve already sorted through a good amount of the good and bad and are giving you a shortcut to just the good! While I know the Kinetic Labs team has not tried nearly 3,000 switches, I can promise you that they’ve tried significantly more than most people have ever tried and so when they build their switch testers with only a handful of the options they’ve ever tried, its with the belief that these are the best, most worthwhile options in those categories that they can find. To even further prove that it’s curated, I was a bit astounded to see the lineups of switch testers they offered as they are not only categorized into types of switches but also feature printed keycaps and informational cards labeled to help describe each switch and help newer users identify what they are. Back when I got my first switch tester, I had to pay extra for unlabeled keycaps and they didn’t even provide a guide of what switch was what in the box!

​I know that this feels like a really obvious point to make, but we do not realize just how much we rely on the internet entirely to form opinions about tangible objects these days. Short of test driving a car or hitting up the changing room at certain clothing stores, there’s not a lot of situations in life where we get to fully or even partially testing something in person before committing to a purchase. This is especially true in the mechanical keyboard hobby. For a lot of people freshly joining the hobby, custom mechanical keyboards are quite an expensive purchase and getting any leg up to ‘try before you buy’ can help make or break your interest in getting more keyboards in the future. Sure, there are good content creators out there who have videos, articles, and guides about which switches to pursue and which ones to ignore, but you have to remember that all of those are built off of the creator’s personal opinion and not a whole lot more than that. Your opinions may not exactly line up with them, even if you like their videos or articles.

Sound tests, while seemingly more objective than just reviews, might not also be good as they’re done with very specific keyboards and designs that you may not be shooting for in your build. And even if you don’t trust any of the content online about keyboards or switches at all, consider that just the marketing from a vendor may not align with your understandings of switches either! One vendor might call some switches soft linears or heavy tactiles, but to you those could very well feel like heavy linears and soft tactiles. The only way you can really truly understand how a switch feels is to try them out for yourself and there’s no substitute for experience. Speaking of which, why you need to physically test out switches leads into my third point…

​If you’ve never tried more than a handful of different types of switches before trying to decide on what your next set of switches to try in a build are, your sense of all of the variety out there probably isn’t all that great. Remember how I said that there’s over 3,000 different modern mechanical keyboard switches that exist out there right now; Do you think you have a good sense of what “wobble” is after having only tried 5 switches? How about what makes a tactile ‘weak’ versus ‘strong’? Do all long pole switches truly bottom out the same? Chances are you probably don’t have a good sense of these things, though it’s not because you are “a noob”, rather you’re just drowning in options. Getting a chance to explore a selected , specific range of switches in a tester – even if they are only just one-off examples – greatly increases your knowledge about switches and can help you calibrate your senses when making your next purchase. For example, knowing that ‘Switch A’ is actually way harder on your fingers than what this vendor says about it online, you may know to adjust your expectations based on what they say about Switch B, C, etc. As well, switch testers can also just directly point you to your new favorite switch that you had no clue existed whatsoever.

In the event that you think I’m overselling the potential of switch testers, consider that every single time I bring my massive switch testers to keyboard meetups that people flock to my tables to try out switches, look for new things they’ve never tried, and absolutely insist on touching dozens of them. Switch testers actually work to help point you in the direction of switches you both do and don’t like, and if they didn’t work at all, people wouldn’t be selling them nor trying them at keyboard meetups…

While I spent a tiny bit of this article bashing on content creators for their opinion heavy takes, there are some guides and articles out there that are actually informative and can help you get a better sense of the mechanical keyboard hobby. Some examples for switches might be some more of my articles here on Kinetic Labs, perhaps… Consider going to check out some other articles such as ‘The Four Common Types of MX Switch Mechanisms’ or ‘Linear Switches Aren’t All The Same’ to learn even more about that huge variety of switches that exist out there!