Razer BlackWidow Chroma, Feel The Bite!

Razer BlackWidow Chroma, A Closer Look

Featuring RGB Led’s in each key the BlackWidow is capable of driving 16.6 Billion Colors and does so quite effectively making it an eye-catching light show wonder sure to draw eyes. Razer hit the BlackWidow on the head with the hammer. Releases in 2010 it immediately became a hit with eSports professionals competing in eSports gaming for serious money. The one thing you can depend on in the world is that if professionals use it (outside endorsement purposes) you’re looking at a top end competitive edge product.

The tightly cloth braided cable terminates in 4 gold-plated Plugs, two USB and two 3.5mm audio one for a microphone and one for speakers or a headset. We’ve seen two designs on the dual USB plugs common on Razers high-end keyboards. one powers the lighting and the other is a USB pass through. Lets move to the next image and we’ll explain more.

The two 3.5mm stereo jacks lead to the side of the BlackWidow Chroma and one of the USB plugs gives you a USB on the side as well. Than makes it handy to plug-in a headset without all those wires stringing back to the machine. The USB port well lets just say it’s well appreciated for quick camera picture unloads, and not having to scoot back and hunt for an open USB port on the tower.

Here’s a closeup of the gold-plated plugs on the BlackWidow Chroma, the braided cloth cable comes down to a terminator block and 4 cables split off in the last foot helping prevent cable clutter.

Even in fully lit rooms the Back-lighting of the RGB LEDs is clearly visible and that should tell you how good it’s going to look in muted lighting conditions.  We turned off all the lights and drew the blinds and in the almost total darkness the back-lighting was enough to allow us to comfortably operate the keyboard.

Excuse the size of the graphic here but we wanted to show you the care Razer takes with its 60 million keystroke rated keys.  The key actuators are surrounded by a tough plastic click together box, the actuator is a cool Zombie green and allows no dust into the inner working of the key. Of course this is a mechanical keyboard as opposed to a tactile keyboard. Mechanical keyboards tend to give you better tactile feedback as to if a key was actually hit. Frankly we’ve discussed it in the lab and mushy keyboards without tactile response get left on the unused pile. Your out on the virtual field of battle and some 7 foot tall Ork decides to have you for dinner you hit the Key on the BlackWidow Chroma and the key gives you back tactile response saying “Yea darn right you hit me and we snuffed that wimpy Ork”. Mushy keyboards you pound at the key and the tendency is to hit the key until your sure it actuated, that’s a waste of battle time. One quiet tactile response click and you know that arrow is speeding to its intended target.

Seen here the Zombie green key actuator is totally protected against dust and foreign objects, it’s a simple and safe matter to pop the key off and do a little under key housekeeping should part of your hot pocket bounce off the keyboard while you watch Zena defeat half an army of attackers.

One thing that is sure to amaze you is how sturdy the Razer BlackWidow is, it’s heavy solid and hefty.  We suspect if that virtual Orc were to struggle out of the screen the Razer BlackWidow Chroma in baseball bat mode would make quite an effective weapon. The weight and heft help the BlackWidow Chroma not to move during gaming and provide durability. A lot of vendors spout Warranties and return policies fully knowing that if a product should fail at 10 months on a 1 year warranty all they have to do is mention receipt and you get no replacement. Unless it’s the 1 in 10000 that comes out of the box faulty we doubt that you’ll have a problem with your Razer products. We use them around the lab on a daily basis and not an over of over a dozen has ever failed or died. A commonly used one is the Razer Marauder Starcraft edition and it’s been in continuous heavy use for 5 years now with few id any signs of degradation or wear. Yes Razer is that serious about their gaming weapons, you may pay a few bucks more but on the back-end you get a Mouse or keyboard you can likely hand down to your kids.