Any price difference on anodized vs polished options?
Wow, that VHS powder coat looks amazing 
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Wallet, I hardly knew ye
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Glad astrophysical is becoming reality to validate my devouring all the purple gmk sets (plum, laser, taro, vaporwave, violet on cream, first love)
Are you still going to offer the polished aluminum option?
The polished options were last-minute additions, and I’m actually thinking against aluminum at the moment. I just had a long discussion with the machinist in which he tried hard to talk me out of it out of concern for its likelihood to scratch very easily relative to stainless. My own tests suggest that aluminum should be OK, but he convinced me I should probably conduct some more real-world tests before representing it as a good finish option, and I found the case he made compelling. It’s similar to the rationale for why I’m no longer offering Type II anodizing.
Anyway, after these discussions, I’m inclined to hold off until a subsequent project to offer polished aluminum until I’ve had a chance to do some longer-term testing. I definitely don’t want to make something that people regret getting just a year or so after it arrives.
Polished stainless is an entirely different matter, however. It is a relatively durable, non-oxidizing metal that is regularly used in luxury watches, which see a lot more abrasion and wear than a keyboard, and it is also fairly easily re-polished when necessary. So I’m very excited to be able to continue to offer that option.
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When assembled, the Veracity Steel Norbaforce weighs in at 9 pounds. 
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Holy cow. That might actually be too heavy for the place I set my keyboard.
K2, VHS, and palm desert are my favorites. How shall I ever decide?
Is it a trick of my eyes/monitor or does Retro Refrigerator look slightly more pale/not as saturated as before? I’m looking at the old Mark I photos like this:
Very slight difference, could just be a artifact of being from two different sets of pictures?
I’m in for the palm desert!
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It’s not your eyes; it’s my color calibration. I think I could have done a better job tweaking the colors in my new set of photos of this finish and I’ll maybe make some adjustments. It’s actually the exact same powder as before and, now that I look at it, the older photos probably represent it better than the new ones (at least on my current monitor).
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VHS is my personal favorite, but FWIW K2 will cost considerably less than any of the other finishes because it is batched with a much larger order of rear cover plates and also has almost an 0% reject rate compared to the other powder finishes. This makes it much less expensive to apply given that we don’t have to account for a large number of reworks, which on tricky finishes like glossy Retro can be considerable.
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So I’ve looked through this whole thread and searched high and low for other resources but as someone coming from just MX experience I find it very confusing how to get into the topre world and still use MX keycaps. Is there a compiled resource on converting topre to MX compatibility? From what I understand the RGB is the easiest option but has some shortcomings like no silent option.
Can someone explain in a nutshell how one would go from an R2 TKL (which has a 6.25u spacebar if I understand correctly) to fully MX compatible?
Realforce R2 TKL: Source sliders and stabilizers from a Novatouch.
Realforce RGB: Des-rings RGB version exists.
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Agreed.
I do think the RGB option makes the most sense; it’s basically an over-featured Novatouch, but gets the job done. 
I’m personally not into silencing on Topre, so I can’t speak to that, however.
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It is hard to believe these are actual photos, there are totally stunning !
To me these are much more usefull than renders to better understand what the final product will be, but maybe that is because I’m getting old fashioned 
I guess most designers don’t start showing their work like you because of the significant cost of the actual prototypes 
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Hehe. Yes, it is insanely expensive to do these one-offs, but I don’t just do it for photography/marketing purposes. It’s because I want to have confidence in what I’ll be able to deliver before I make any promises to people. And the only way to do that is actually to get some of your product made by the same people and process that will be used in production. This is the main reason I avoid renders whenever possible. Having nice pre-production samples to photograph is just a nice downstream side-effect.
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Alright. I’m ready to roll. Let’s move the discussion over to the GB thread. 
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