Corsair is a well-known name for cases, keyboards, CLCs, mics, mice, and other PC components. Throughout the years, the company has established a fairly strong brand name by generally providing good products that are usually at decent price points. This is not to suggest they are perfect -- sometimes things aren’t competitive, have lackluster performance, or look ugly.
Then there are Corsair’s RGB keyboards. Quite frankly, they’re a large blot on Corsair’s track record. Corsair’s RGB keyboards have suffered from buggy software, a delayed launch, low availability and, most recently, the controversy of their advertised “16.8 million color” mode reared its head again. Since launch, Corsair’s keyboards were only capable of 512 colors, despite Corsair advertising 16.8 million. Users found this out, leading to months of promised fixes to provide the advertised 16.8 million colors.
Corsairfinally made true on those promises, but in the 16.8 million color mode, the LEDs will flicker unless the profile is made up of static colors. For those interested, I suggest reading the entire story here, as it is a bit more complicated. Though to their credit, Corsair has tried to make-up for their blunder by continuing to supply updates for their RGB keyboards and are offering refunds for those unhappy with them.
In an effort to further support their RGB keyboards, Corsair has recently added RGB profile sharing to their CorsairGaming.com site. Profiles are the static or dynamic color settings for Corsair’s RGB keyboards. While profile sharing has been around for a while, users have been required to download and move the files into the CUE software themselves. Not hard, but certainly not the most convenient or user-friendly solution. The primary advantage to web-based sharing this is that profiles download directly into CUE.
To add to this, Corsair’s new RGB profile sharing includes video previews, searching for profiles, and sorting by most-downloaded and most-liked. The videos are user made, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see some low quality ones; other than having a customized gif/HTML5 video artificially generated for every profile, real life videos will have to suffice.
What seems to be one of the more exciting features of Cosair’s new RGB profile sharing is that Corsair intends to host profile contests in the coming months. Corsair hasn’t set a date yet, or rules, or if there will be prizes... so details are certainly scarce for the profile competitions, but we’ll keep you updated.
- Michael "The Bear" Kerns.