Is Logitech K830 the Best HTPC Keyboard to Date?
April 2014 Anthony Garland
For as long as there has been HTPC, Logitech has been one of the few manufacturers that tirelessly roll out niche peripherals for media center PCs that stay in the living room. Ranging from a freestyle mouse to a 2-in-1 keyboard, Logitech continues to experiment with different configurations to perfect the next HTPC keyboard. The K830 is the result, and it combines the advantages of both the HTPC-friendly K400 and the more conventional TK820 keyboard.
If anyone recalls the K400 and K820, the former suffers from mediocre mushroom dome switches to a less than stellar touchpad whereas the latter is more polished yet it lacks key illuminations, and is a tad too large to be used comfortably in most living rooms.
The K830 seems to have solved most of the aforementioned problems. First, there’s backlighting – a must for any HTPC accessories. Then, Logitech cuts down the unit’s size to a mere 14.4″ in length and 4.9″ in width. This compares favorably to TK820’s 16.1″ by 5.7″ in dimensions.
Also like the TK820, the K830 has an elegant all metal chassis, an optimized ‘island’ key layout and numerous dedicated multimedia shortcut keys. Touchpad, however, is smaller to make space for dedicated left/right mouse buttons.
As a wireless keyboard, the K830 relies on the tried and true Unifying to connect to a nearby PC up to 10m apart via a 2.4GHz nano USB dongle. This makes it a convenient choice for those who want to control their setup from a distance, including activities like navigating through a Mastercard casino online. The K830 is also equipped with a 20-hour battery that only takes 3 hours to recharge over USB. At $99, you can grab it for a much lower price during holidays, but the Logitech K830 comes with a shorter-than-usual one-year warranty. Thought you should know.
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This is most definitely not the best HTPC keyboard.
The k830 is the fourth keyboard I’ve used for my HTPC setups. They keyboard itself is great; it feels very solid and it’s not too compact. The problem is with the trackpad and it’s accompanied drivers.
The Logitech driver tries to provide kinetic scrolling where the momentum of the scrolling is calculated by the movement speed of two fingers swiping up or down. However the driver sometimes misses some partial movement motions, which causes the scrolling to behave inconsistent. Sometimes the scrolling movement slows down and, more annoyingly, it scrolls at the speed of light.
Another problem with the kinetic scrolling is that the easing takes way too long. Even when the page isn’t visible scrolling anymore, the driver is still sending a lot of scroll up/down messages. If you’re unaware of this and you press the CTRL key when for example switching tabs (ctrl+tab) in a browser or copying and pasting anything (ctrl-c/v), you’ll end up with the webpage in your face at either 10% or 10000% zoom level. (CTRL + scroll up/down zooms webpages)
The worst of this kinetic scrolling is that you cannot turn it off. I would have been okay with this keyboard if it did plain old scrolling.
I love kinetic scrolling on all my other devices, but this is such a terrible implementation it makes this solid piece of equipment a complete failure.
no AAA are expensive. AA all the way. let it take AAs and if someone wants to they can put in rechargeables. my k400 lasts about 5 months and i use it quite a bit so handling the battery is not a pain. almost every computer accessory with a rechargeable battery has left me cursing it
It should use replaceable (rechareable) AAA batteries.