Steelcase Karman High Back Review: Adaptable frame, now with a headrest

I say it constantly, and I'll say it again: the best gaming chair isn't necessarily a gaming chair. In fact, the best gaming chair usually isn't a gaming chair, because while gaming chairs have been around ever since aftermarket auto fitters were trying to find an audience for their leftover racing seats, gaming is actually nothing like racing. Your gaming mouse and keyboard might be zipping around (or trying to) with an ultra-speedy, ultra-low-latency 8,000 Hz polling rate, but you aren't. Instead of looking at racing-style gaming chairs, look at tried-and-true boring, office-friendly task chairs.

Except task chairs these days are far from boring, as the Steelcase Karman High Back in color-shifting Blue-Red Intermix Shift mesh fabric, proves. The Karman High Back is a refined, lightweight task chair with a flexible, weight-activated frame for perfect, customized full-body support — all the way up to your head and neck. It's the high-backed version of the Steelcase Karman, which we tried and loved, and comes with a built-in headrest and neck cushion for extra back, shoulder, and neck support you might not even realize you need.

But first things first: it's not cheap, as most task chairs aren't. It starts at $1,072 for an all-black armless chair with no additional lumbar support, and goes up to $1,695 for a color-shifting chair with 4-way adjustable arms, extra lumbar support, hubless wheels for hard floors, and carbon neutral certification.

While this is certainly a lot compared to the average gaming chair — which usually comes in at under $600, it's actually a pretty good price for a fancy task chair. My primary chair is the Herman Miller Aeron, which starts at $1,275 for the base model and goes up to $2,340 for a model with fully-adjustable arms, adjustable PostureFit lumbar support, and polished aluminum accents. That's not to say the Karman High Back isn't still pretty expensive — it is — but as the extra lumbar support and 4-way adjustable arms feel somewhat unnecessary, the configuration I'd recommend comes to about $1,262, which is a pretty good price for a high-end task chair.

Assembly of the Karman High Back

The Karman High Back ships fully assembled.

Design of the Karman High Back

The Karman High Back is the high-back version of the Steelcase Karman. It's an all-mesh task chair with a flexible, lightweight frame and a five-wheel aluminum base. It has, as you might expect from the name, a higher back with adjustable (but non-detachable) neck support.

Like the Karman, the Karman High Back has a mixed frame — the main frame is aluminum, but the frame that holds the mesh is made of a softer, flexible material that's designed to move with your body and help eliminate the pressure points that are common in all-mesh chairs.

The frame is "weight-activated," and is designed to respond to the little movements you make while sitting — the chair adjusts with you to provide as much support as possible. It also has a hybrid seat, which consists of mesh suspended over cushioning for the best of both worlds (when it comes to comfort — perhaps the worst of both worlds when it comes to cleaning).

The chair comes in Steelcase's "Intermix" mesh fabric in several color options: black, "baltic" (blue), "merlot" (burgundy), and "peacock" (light teal) all come in both translucent mesh and opaque mesh-fabric options, while "seagull" (beige white) and "bronze" come in only the opaque mesh-fabric option. You can also opt for the pricier-but-prettier Intermix Shift fabric, which is a multi-colored translucent mesh that color-shifts with the light and comes in Red-Blue Intermix or Blue-Gold Intermix. Our review unit came in Red-Blue Intermix fabric, with a "merle" and obsidian frame.

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The main frame of our review model is a semi-shiny black painted aluminum, while the softer, flexible secondary frame material is... basically a dark gray. The mesh is a distinct blue and red weave that looks like a cool-toned purple from afar and shifts to red depending on the angle of the chair.

The mesh is semi-translucent, and feels much softer than the average mesh you'll find on task chairs — even high-end task chairs such as my ride-or-die Herman Miller Aeron. The mesh on the Aeron is distinctly plasticky — though it's not uncomfortable, thanks to the smooth, tight weave, but the Intermix mesh feels much closer to fabric. The Intermix Shift fabric is not quite as soft as the opaque Intermix fabric we saw on our review unit of the regular Karman, but it's still very soft. It's nothing like the mesh on the Fractal Refine chair, which was so scratchy I could feel through my clothing.

The Karman High Back in this colorway is certainly a striking, unique-looking chair — I think you'd be hard pressed to find anything like it, in either the gaming chair or the task chair market. It has a tall, sculpted back frame that curves in slightly at the top for neck support, and its light, curvy frame makes it seem much smaller than most gaming chairs (also, it is much smaller than most gaming chairs).

While the standard racing-style gaming chair normally weighs as much as a small adult — even the hybrid gaming- and task-chair Fractal Refine still weighed a whopping 78.7 pounds (35.7kg) — the Karman High Back weighs a mere 31 pounds (14.06kg).

The chair sits on a five-point aluminum wheelbase with the same semi-shiny black finish as the rest of the frame. Our review unit came with 2.5-inch plastic wheels for carpet — the cheapest option available. Other options include wheels designed for hard floors (+$23), hubless wheels for carpet (+$90), and hubless wheels for hard floors (+$114).

Specs

Comfort and Adjustments of the Karman High Back

The Karman High Back is designed to adjust to your body — it responds directly to your weight, and moves with you to provide support no matter how you sit. Because it's supposed to adjust in real-time as you sit, there aren't a lot of manual adjustments to be made. While many gaming chairs, including the popular Secretlab Titan Evo 2022, can practically flatten into a bed, you won't find that kind of excessive recline on a task chair — and definitely not on the Karman High Back.

In fact, this chair only has one multi-function adjustment knob/paddle, located under the seat on the right side. This adjustment knob/paddle is how you'll adjust both height and the strength of the chair's weight-activated tilt/recline — and that's it, because those are all the adjustments you can make to this chair, for the most part. Adjusting the height is straight forward: lift the paddle to activate the gas lift, and raise/lower the seat (if you've ever used a chair before, this works exactly the same as every other chair you've ever used). The Karman High Back has a floor-to-seat height of between 15.81 inches (40.16cm) and 20.44 inches (51.92cm).

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You can also use the adjustment knob to tune the chair's tilt-recline strength and limiter: turning the knob lets you switch between four steps. The first step locks the chair in an upright position, while the second step allows for some recline but stops you about halfway. The third position allows for full, "unlimited" recline (the chair "reclines" around 22 degrees, at most) but has a 20% tension boost, and the fourth and final step allows for full recline with no tension boost. This is similar to how other task chairs, such as the Herman Miller Aeron and the Herman Miller x Logitech G Vantum work — no recline, just a tension-limited tilt-recline that sort of lets you rock back. While it's not going to be as good for lying flat and taking a nap (like you can do in the Cooler Master Caliber X2), you probably shouldn't be taking a nap in your chair, anyway.

Even without much in the way of manual adjustments, I found the Karman High Back to be very comfortable. I was a little worried about the headrest, which curves inward and features a permanently-attached neck "cushion" — I'm not a big fan of headrests to begin with, and the way the chair curves makes me think of an airplane seat (even if the Karman High Back is mesh and therefore much more flexible). The back rises 32.63 inches (82.89cm) from the seat, and the headrest is pretty unavoidable as you'll need to lean back in the chair to tilt-recline.

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The attached neck cushion can be raised or lowered to fit against your neck, but it can't be removed. I'm not a big fan of neck cushions, so the Karman High Back took a little getting used to — luckily, the headrest is fairly flexible, like the rest of the chair, so this didn't take as long as I thought it would.

While I'm still not sure I'd personally opt for a headrest with a neck cushion if given the choice, the neck cushion is pretty well-implemented as far as neck cushions go — it's subtle and blends well with the chair, unlike memory foam neck pillows you'll find strapped around the top of chairs like the Andaseat Kaiser 3. I would still like the option of removing it — because what if you happen to have a particularly short torso and it hits right where your head is? — but I suppose that if that does happen, it's not so bulky as to be an actual problem.

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Speaking of torso height and size in general, the Karman High Back is able to support up to 350 pounds (158.76kg) and Steelcase doesn't list a height range. However, I will point out that the Karman High Back's seat depth is not adjustable, and it's fairly shallow — 16.3 inches (41.4cm).

Of course, because the seat leans and flexes with your movement, this is not the same as if a rigid, straight-backed chair had such a shallow seat depth — but it's still fairly shallow, and if you have longer legs, you should probably try the chair before you make any big purchases.

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What is nice about the chair is that as long as you don't have particularly long legs, it fits a variety of people fairly comfortably. I'm 5'7" and my husband is 5'11", so we're not vastly different heights, but we both found the chair to be very comfortable without needing to make any adjustments when switching (and we usually need to do some adjusting). The only minor issue I had with comfort was when I wanted to sit cross-legged — the Karman's relatively shallow seat depth and width (the seat's point-of-contact width is about 19.25 inches) meant I did feel the frame digging slightly into my thighs.

The chair's "soft, flexible frame" is designed to stop the frame from digging into your thighs when you're sitting in the chair normally, but I suppose they didn't consider people like me, who like to sit in chairs in totally unnatural ways (which is... understandable). However, when I tried to sit in this chair cross-legged, I was reminded of just how small the seat actually is, and that does seem like it will limit users more than weight will (I can't imagine a 350-pound person would be very comfortable in this chair, even if it had no issues supporting them.

Our review model came with 4-way adjustable arms, but you can also save money with height-adjustable only arms ($44 less) or with no arms ($278 less). The Karman High Back's arms have rounded, lightly padded tops with a matte, soft-touch finish that feels a little... well, cheap, considering the care and attention paid to the rest of the chair. They don't feel like they're going to fall apart or anything, they're just not what I would expect on a $1,000+ chair (I'm not sure what I'd expect, however — just something more... premium). They're fixed to the base of the chair and can be adjusted to be wider, if necessary.

There's a small button under each arm rest that allows you to move it up and down — from a minimum floor-to-armrest height of TKTK to a maximum of TKTK. Aside from height, adjusting the chair's arm rests involves pushing the padded tops around — you can move them forward/back, right/left, and angle them diagonally, and they don't click or snap into place so you can sort of just move them to whatever position you want. They also don't lock into place, however — it takes a little pressure to move them, so they're not clacking all over the place like the trigger-happy arm rests on the Thermaltake Argent E700, but I like to be able to lean on my arm rests. The 4-way movement of these arm rests doesn't seem to add much in the way of comfort or convenience, so I would probably stick with the height-only adjustable arm rests for the Karman.

Our review model also came with optional adjustable lumbar support, which is a little less impressive considering the whole chair is supposed to be designed to move seamlessly with your body and offer it real-time support. The extra lumbar support is basically just a piece of curved plastic that clips to the back of the chair.

You can slide it up and down to adjust it, or you can clip and unclip it — it's not built into the chair, and, as such, feels like a bit of an afterthought. The chair's tightly-woven mesh and flexible, ever-moving frame does a decent job of offering back, shoulder, and neck support — while I didn't dislike the extra lumbar support, I wasn't particularly impressed by it, either. But I also didn't feel any pain in my lower back while using the chair, so it seems like it did the job about as well as I could have expected.

My only concern, of course, is that mesh chairs can definitely stretch with use, meaning it's possible you will need that lumbar support add-on once you've had this chair for a few years. Of course, since it just clips on, that means you can always add it on later when (if) you need to.

Bottom Line

The Karman High Back is a nice alternative to its shorter sibling, the Karman, for those who are looking for head and neck support, but I don't think it's really going to add anything if you're not already looking for a headrest. I didn't find the Karman High Back to be any more comfortable than the Karman — and, in fact, I found it to be less comfortable for a little while as I got used to the neck cushion and headrest in general — but my husband, who loves headrests, definitely appreciated the higher back.

The Karman High Back has several features that can't be adjusted or avoided — the neck cushion can't be removed, the seat depth can't be adjusted, and the tilt-recline in the chair itself only has four steps — so I'd recommend taking a look at it in person before you take any expensive plunges. While I love lightweight, all-mesh task chairs, many people (understandably) do not.

This chair's hybrid mesh-and-cushion seat should make it more appealing to those who dislike all-mesh chairs, however — the cushion adds a nice amount of support and comfort without taking away the resilience and breathability you get with mesh (though, again, it seems like it could be difficult to clean), which is especially nice to see on a chair that's only weighs 31 pounds.

Of course, the Herman Miller x Logitech G Vantum offers a very similar premise — it has a cushioned seat and a mesh backrest — and is a little more affordable, starting at $895 (though it frequently goes on sale). It also comes with Herman Miller's excellent PostureFit lumbar support, and comes in several different colors — however, the Steelcase Karman High Back definitely implements the neck rest better. Also, the Karman High Back just looks better, overall, and it feels sturdier and better-built.