Another week, another new keycap profile

Not sure if it’s actually new or not, but this is my first time hearing about WDA profile - looks like a row-sculpted profile with a very slight, almost flat spherical dish, kind of like MDA.

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Looks interesting, but my fingers sometimes feel lost on flatter profiles like that. I’d be willing to try it for fun, though.

NOT SURE HOW I FEEL ABOUT THE FONT ON THE MODIFIERS

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I don’t recognize this profile called QX SA, it looks interesting but it has a bar for the homing keys :person_shrugging:


https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005705384564.html

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Looks very similar to MG profile to me. Really scoopy.

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The seller asked me to extend the delivery deadline because these are still in pre-production.

Very low risk to buy these regardless: the price is stupidly low, so I’ll take it on the chin if the quality isn’t great.

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Sorry to revive an old comment, but did you use the EMA caps enough to have a long-term opinion?

The mixed colour schemes means I’d annoyingly have to buy both to get a plain black set. But I’d pay the US$80 if you’d enjoyed them long-term.

I’m a little worried about the large surface area - I have bags of mda & xda caps I’ll never use because they’re too wide and flat.

I have seen all-black EMA sets - I actually have one that I got for less than $20 from Idobao. I have some impressions of it and a bunch of comparison photos here, if you haven’t seen that already:

If you have seen that already or want a TL;DR:

If you don’t like MDA, you probably won’t like EMA. It’s not quite as wide, but it’s just as flat.

MDA in front, EMA behind that, then OEM in the back

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Thanks, yes I did read your writeup. It was great, but I was wondering if long term use had given you a strong opinion

Honestly no - I didn’t like them enough to use them more than a couple days :stuck_out_tongue:

I have been enjoying HSA and DCS, though - both are a little shorter and more scooped than EMA.

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I saw multiple stores add listings for that keycap set, did they shipped yours yet?

Yes, shipped on 30th June. It hasn’t arrived yet.

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So my QX SA set arrived today.

It’s quite similar to AF SA, but the R2 is angled slightly flatter and I’m not a fan of the numpad font (or the typography choices in general) vs AF SA.

But at less than half the cost of (already cheap) AF SA sets, I’m happy. Prices have gone up a little bit since I bought, but this is still a very cheap way to get decent spherical caps.


QXSA_AFSA_Underneath

Edited to add:-

I’ve been using these for a couple of days now, so some more thoughts…

They sound nicer than AF SA, I guess because of the PBT.
And it might not be obvious from the photos, but the keytops have a flat center, with a curve at the edges. I prefer the way AF SA feels when you rest your fingers on them, but for actual typing I’m not minding the shape at all.

I really like these, and I’m going to use them long term.

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The same store is now selling two more color schemes of QX SA, I guess more cloned color schemes will come in the future


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Thanks for the heads-up. I had trouble finding these. If anyone’s looking, these are labelled as “QX GMK” rather than “QX SA”.

My QX SA Fishing set arrived today.

It’s easier to judge the quality on this set vs the black set I bought earlier.

The finish on these - a satin semi-gloss - feels and looks great.

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Womier released another profile called Box, no real pictures https://aliexpress.com/item/1005005892669410.html

I think Womier is the one behind the different XVX profiles but I could be wrong

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After years of hearing manufacturers complain about how hard it is to make new molds and JTK struggling with HSA for three years and NK profile dying before protos were ever made this parade of new profiles feels comical!

But cheers to diversity and given what GMK and others have in store there will only be even more to explore :slight_smile:

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seems like it’s most likely a reflection of how easy your access to an injection mold machine is (and whatever machine they use to make the molds). If you can do it after-hours on a machine you own it’s probably pretty easy.

That doesn’t explain HSA though, I would assume that’s mostly indifference mixed with personnel turnover.

Looks a bit like marshmallows, or maybe beach-stones.

@rpiguy9907 Right? I think part of it is that some of these are dye-sub PBT, which is inherently less complicated than doubleshot on the tooling front. I think another part of it is widely varying quality standards. One more factor that I think is likely is manufacturer experience, and how much a given project they’re working on falls within it.

More waxing about profile development time

For example, RAMA has been iterating on the CAPS profile (being manufactured by Mastars) for quite some time now, which looks to come down to some respectable perfectionism in terms of legend consistency across the set and across different colorways. This goes to the point where some different colors are getting different molds in the service of visual consistency. At the same time, clones of that profile shape appear to have already been out in the wild for more than a year now. Maybe it’s a dye-sub version, maybe it’s product for the Chinese market being produced with tooling rejected by RAMA, maybe it’s another factory that’s quicker with tooling development. Who knows.

Then again, there’s JTK HSA - it took a long time to come to fruition and does look stunning at first glance, but honestly I think it still needs time in the oven. Legend line consistency is frankly pretty rough, especially on the Brown on Beige set.

In the beginning, that was something of an issue for MT3, too (manufactured by Tera Plastics) - though I think that was more down to injection than the tools themselves. Early BoW / WoB sets had lots of iffy examples - I’ve returned 4 or 5 in the course of doing customer builds - but I haven’t seen a reject set in maybe a year and a half, so they figured something out. By the same token, though, MT3’s legend consistency still isn’t perfect. At least as good as standard, on par with stuff like Signature Plastics - but not perfect. Variance across a single set and between sets is definitely a thing.

From the same manufacturer (Tera Plastics), DCX does not appear to have any of these issues, and Drop even mentions in their marketing that they spent some extra time on the tooling to ensure legend consistency was within a certain defined tolerance. I don’t know how long they spent on that, but it does appear to be a lesson learned from the time already spent developing MT3.

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These are MOA profile, which is all over AliExpress now.

I don’t usually like keycaps without a sculpt, but the shape and size of the keytops makes these quite nice to type on.

They’re very nicely dye-subbed too, so I’m tempted to get one of the more decorative sets as a Christmas gift for someone with kids.

EDIT: of course, typical AliExpress QC, my semicolon key has a homing bar.

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