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Corsair's Galleon 100 SD is an LED-lit keyboard with a built-in Stream Deck — $349 offering includes 720 x 180 screen, dials, and more
Old-timers around here will remember the ill-fated Optimus keyboards with LED displays underneath the keys. They were quite ahead of their time, but alas, never widely produced. The advent of streaming and the growing popularity of shortcut pads revitalized the notion, though, and Corsair's Galleon 100 SD combines the best of both worlds.
Describing the Galleon in one sentence is simple: it's a near-full-sized keyboard, except the usual numeric pad is instead an Elgato Stream Deck. The trick here is that it's all one unit, thus obviating the need for separate cabling, configuration utilities, and desk space.
The Galleon's Stream Deck contains 12 keys, each with its own LED display, resting underneath a main 720x1280 screen along with two dials. Each key is fully customizable, and although the Galleon seems targeted at streamers first, the pad can be used with many apps and games, from Spotify to Final Fantasy.
In fact, not only has Corsair posted multiple guides detailing the extensive software controls, but the Galleon also supports plugins from the Elgato Marketplace, so once you have a Galleon, you can sail there right away for customization booty. Notable application-specific plugins include Twitch, YouTube, Discord, OBS Studio, and a multitude of games.
As for the keyboard itself, it's a pretty fancy unit all of its own. It has pre-lubed Corsair MLX pulse linear switches, resting on a gasket-mounted PCB and six layers of sound dampening. The switches are hot-swappable, and you can employ three- or five-pin switches as the board supports both.
All that should provide quite a comfortable and quiet gaming experience, and it's further improved by the 8 KHz polling rate and Flash Tap SOCD. That's Corsair's take on prioritizing the last pressed movement key so that, for example, it's easy to counter-strafe in Counterstrike 2 by pressing the opposite direction without releasing the first.
The Corsair Galleon 100 SD is pricey at $349.99, but it seems like decent value, as a Stream Deck is about $135 all on its own. Corsair says these will ship between January 30 and February 2, essentially two-upping every other potential competitor by actually existing in the market and arriving with an application ecosystem ready to roll.
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There are other options, but none quite as solid. The Finalmouse Centerpiece Pro keyboard is similarly priced but only expected to materialize in September, while the Flux keyboard seemingly never went into full production. And although the aforementioned Optimus keyboards from Art Lebedev looked fantastic, very few made their way onto users' desks.
Bruno Ferreira is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware. He has decades of experience with PC hardware and assorted sundries, alongside a career as a developer. He's obsessed with detail and has a tendency to ramble on the topics he loves. When not doing that, he's usually playing games, or at live music shows and festivals.
