The Stream Deck has mastered the LCD key by making it peripheral

Like many great products, the Elgato Stream Deck wasn’t Exactly a new idea.

When the very first debuted six years ago this month, we immediately pitted it against Art Lebedev’s legendary Optimus Maximus keyboard, which promised an array of OLED screens swirling under your fingertips a full decade earlier. Razer also pioneered LCD keys ahead of time, attaching them to a keyboard and the company’s very first Blade laptop.

Button of the month

In today’s digital age, it sometimes feels like the hardware has taken a back seat to the software that runs our devices. Button of the Month is a monthly column that explores the physical parts of our phones, tablets and controllers that we interact with every day.

But today we celebrate the simple genius of Elgato, the company that finally turned them into a viable product by making them relatively affordable, comfortable, and most importantly: peripheral.

Art Lebedev and Razer both believed that we wanted a new keyboard that transforms, where our primary computing input mechanism needs to be replaced with one that intelligently adapts to our needs.

Even today, the idea sounds great: “Because Photoshop and Earthquake show up with the same boring keyboard?” you can practically hear Art Lebedev’s concept images ask.

Left: A Photoshop layout. Right: A Quake layout with fewer keys used.Image: Art Lebedev

Razer, perhaps inspired by that Earthquake keyboard layout, asked a later question in 2011: “If your keys can transform, maybe you don’t need that many to play PC games on the go?” The result was the Razer Switchbladea prototype 7-inch concept mobile gaming PC created through a partnership with Intel.

Razer hasn’t sold that one, though. The latest “Razer Switchblade” proved far less exciting at the time: ten LCD keys and a touchscreen trackpad built into a regular keyboard. You can almost see a Stream Deck if you look closely, but still integrated, not yet peripheral.

I took this photo in 2012 of Razer Star Wars: The Old Republic keyboard.Photo by Sean Hollister / RockedBuzz

That’s why the idea didn’t work. Razer thought users would buy an expensive keyboard ($250) or laptop ($2000+), forgo the familiarity of the input devices they already possessed and trust that game developers would support its new Switchblade UI. It also didn’t help that the keys were brutal: stiff, flat, and brittle.

The Elgato Stream Deck required none of these compromises.

Photo by Dan Seifert / RockedBuzz

The Stream Deck quickly billed itself as a purpose-built tool right up to its name, giving you handy buttons to control Twitch, OBS, and Twitter from the get-go. (Does a lot more today.) You put it on next to your favorite keyboard, instead of replacing it, and between that and the $80 starting price of the six-key Stream Deck Mini, I was easily sold.

The buttons of an Elgato Stream Deck, in profile.Photo by Dan Seifert / RockedBuzz

And the keys, those keys… soft, comfortable, inviting, each press jeweled as if it would pop a piece of bubble wrap. I’m not saying it resembles the satisfying crunch of a mechanical switch – it’s a whole different joy.

By the way… I have a little announcement to make, as a surprise to any Stream Deck owners who may be reading this story:

RockedBuzz has its official Stream Deck plugin!

Here you are:

Before setting off on a 2600-mile hike — seriously, he’s hiking the Pacific Crest Trail — my dear colleague Mitchell Clark coded the app to pop my daydream bubbles, complete with sound effects. (He actually introduced it to Elgato on his first day on the trail.) It works with as many buttons as you like; Tom even tested an entire page of bubbles on his 32-button Stream Deck XL.

It is available in the Elgato app storeit is our free gift to you and you can download it now.

I plan to interview Elgato’s boss in the near future and plan to ask how they managed to make these keys feel good. We already know that there isn’t a little screen under each key:

The buttons are all contact lenses that sit on top of a single LCD screen. The more you know!

Related

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