Tesoro might be a relatively new player on the peripherals market, but that doesn't mean that it is ignoring its competitors. The company, therefore, announced its Excalibur RGB keyboard, which is the newcomer's attempt at a mechanical keyboard with multi-color LED lighting.
The keyboard itself features a fairly simple design, accented only by the LED lighting, a Tesoro logo, and a "Break the Rules" text above the arrow keys. Some of the keyboard's features include full N-Key rollover over PS/2 (6-key over USB), 512 KB of on-board memory for storing macros, and multiple lighting modes.
The lighting on the keyboard isn't as customizable as that of some competitors, but it's not entirely limited either. Each key can individually light up with one of 16.8 million colors, and there are multiple preset lighting modes. These include breathing effects, color looping, two gaming modes, and a solid color. The lighting can also be dimmed with four different brightness levels.
Tesoro did not indicate the manufacturer of the "gaming-grade" mechanical switches, although considering Cherry has an exclusive deal with Corsair on its RGB switches, they aren't the real deal. That's not a bad thing, though, as knock-off switches are very well built these days, and Tesoro has even made four different switch types available for the keyboard: Blue, Black, Brown and Red, so chances are that you'll be able to buy one with your preferred switch type.
Tesoro priced the keyboard at $119.00, and it should be available through various retail channels sometime in December.
Follow Niels Broekhuijsen @NBroekhuijsen. Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.
