by There’s a lot about the MelGeek Pixel (opens in a new tab) that should speak to me on so many different levels. The first, quite obviously, is the LEGO styling. Although MelGeek just as obviously cannot claim any affiliation with the famous Danish brand. What it can do, however, is be “brick compatible” and by that it means a stand width and depth equal to the LEGO standard.
More or less.
Every part of the design is LEGO, sorry, brick-compatible – from the keys to the keys, to the indicator lights, to the feet, to the entire surface of the board. Included in the $199 package is a bunch of extra bricks that you can use to decorate your Pixel keyboard with funky pixel art style or cute messages.
Or you can use the blocks to add a little extra height to the board on the back to give you a better angle to write at.
Pixel specifications
Size: Full 104 keys
Connection: USB Type-C, 2.4 GHz wireless, Bluetooth 5.2
Switches: Kailh and Gateron (linear, tactile and clicky)
Hot swappable: Yes
N key rollover: Yes
Price: $199 (opens in a new tab)
Then, once you get past the decidedly non-LEGO stuff, you end up with an enthusiast-grade keyboard with hot-swappable mechanical switches that you can just pull out and replace at will. As long as you have a switch pull, that is. You only get one keycap puller in the box. It’s also a wireless card, with RGB lighting playing around the brick-compatible edges of the chassis.
And that, unfortunately, is where all the positivity ends. Yes, it looks funky in that LEGO geek-chic way, but when something looks so much like a toy, you’d be surprised if it doesn’t end up feeling like one. And I’m not surprised by the Pixel.
First, it’s a genuinely horrible writing pad. The actual Kailh Pixel T switches that come in this review model are nice, but that’s not the problem. Let me elaborate with a piece of unedited typing:
The biological problem is that the keys are just far too close to be able to deliver a particularly accurate touch experience. They literally bump into each other with the smooth but concave brick-compatible keys that won’t hold your digits in check. IU Munich prefers a board where there is at least some separation between the keys.
Also, without a wrist rest, your hands are stuck at such an oblique angle that you can’t help but end up regularly pressing the key directly below the one you’re aiming at.
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So yeah, not ideal by any stretch of the imagination. Especially if you spend most of your working life writing copy.
I get that MelGeek wants to find the pixel aesthetic with the Pixel keyboard, and make it look for all the world like a keyboard you’d actually find in a LEGO set, but to me it’s just not worth it for the ultimate sacrifice in ergonomics .
There is one thing I do like though, and that is the USB Type-C cable. It’s a nice blue, flat one, and I appreciate the brick elements on either end of the wire.
My last issue though is anything to do with brick compatibility. There’s a lot I can forgive in LEGO’s name, and if it was built with the same absolute rigid quality that has become the byword for the Danish mega-toy, I might feel a little more lenient about its general failings as an actual keyboard. But the Pixel keyboard suffers from the same kind of QA issues as every other non-LEGO set I’ve ever experienced.
The often unrecognized quality of LEGO is its rock-solid reliability. You know 100% that a brick you pick up today will be compatible with one from fifty years ago, and almost more importantly, it will have the same degree of stickiness. The way LEGO bricks stick together is the key to their power as building blocks, something the knock-off versions don’t have.
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Maybe that’s not a huge problem most of the time, but when you rely on that strength of connection to form the feet of a keyboard, and the only way you can actually create a vaguely effective typing angle, then you have a set of legs that just breaking off at the slightest movement is a problem.
The build quality issues also extend to the chassis. This is a $200 keyboard and yet there is an obnoxious amount of give in the plastic chassis. There is no stiffness to it and I don’t have much confidence in the longevity of the unit. And it’s not a place I want to be when asked to spend that much on an enthusiast keyboard.
So yes, for me it’s a no. A strong no.
