Razer Unveil World First Optical Laptop Keyboard

Razer has launched the worlds first optical laptop keyboard inside the pink Razer Blade 15 promising “speed of light” operational performance in every keystroke.

The special edition Razer Blade 15 launched in support of the company’s #QuartzForACause campaign for the Breast Cancer Research Foundation.

Customers can pick up the gaming laptop in the Advanced edition for $2,649 USD on Razer’s website in either Classic Black, Quartz Pink or Mecury White, and will be made available to Asia-Pacific soon.

The Razer Blade 15 comes with an Intel Core i7-9750H 6-Core CPU, an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 GPU, 16GB of DDR4 RAM, 512GB storage and the aforementioned optical laptop keyboard.

With the rise of mechanical keyboards in modern gaming keyboards from the likes of Corsair and Logitech, Razer has taken a new approach by completely reinventing the switch.

Rather than an electronic contact pad or an analogue actuation point in a mechanical switch, the keys trigger when an infrared light beam is broken by the keypress, providing an instantaneous response from the keyboard.

The switches themselves offer an actuation point of only 1mm at 55 grams of actuation force, which is similar to the Razer Yellow Switch, which the company claims is its’ fastest and quietest’.

Tactile feedback has been added into the optical switch to help users known when an input has been registered, plus each keycap offers N-Key Rollover with anti-ghosting, and of course, RGB lighting through the Razer Chroma app.

Brad Wildes, Senior Vice President of Razer’s Systems Division, called the Razer Blade 15 laptop with the new optical laptop keyboard a ‘first of its kind”.

Razer had previously dabbled in optical switches with the launch of its Opto-Mechanical keys, which combined a largely mechanical construction with infrared actuation.