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Software, Lighting & Teardown
Software (Mainly Lighting)
The G810 offers numerous ways you can tweak the lighting. You’re going to need the LGS software for this one.
Lighting Settings
When you click the light bulb icon (“Lighting Settings,” if you mouse over) in the software, you’re greeted by an immensely cheerful, animated rainbow GUI of the keyboard. The GUI reflects whatever lighting effect is currently enabled on your keyboard; by default, it’s a rainbow wave.
On the lower left side of the page, under Lighting Mode, you can select Freestyle, Zones, or Effects. Under Freestyle, you can set the color of each individual key, and you can do so by selecting one of the 10 stock colors (including “black,” which is simply “off”); adjusting with a series of sliders; and/or punching in R, G, and B numbers. Simply click a key in the GUI, and it will instantly change.
Zones lets you configure the lighting for clusters of keys, such as the WASD cluster, number keys, F keys, modifiers, and so on. You can adjust the colors using the same methods as Freestyle.
You don’t adjust colors in Effects - just the effects themselves. The options are:
- Fixed Color
- Breathing
- Star Effect
- Color Cycle
- Color Wave
- Key Press
For each effect, there may be additional settings you can tweak. For example, under Color Wave, you can also set the direction of the wave (horizontal, vertical, center out) as well as the speed (using a handy slider). For Breathing, you can choose a color and adjust the speed. For the Star Effect, you can choose two colors, one for the “stars” and one for the “sky.” And so on.
One of the things I find amazing about the LGS software is that the changes you make take effect immediately, and you don’t have to click “apply” or anything of the sort.
Note that even dedicated media buttons are backlit and respond to lighting changes.
As a final note on the lighting, Logitech should be commended for its application on the G810. The through-step lighting design of the Romer-G switches means the LED shines through the center of the keycap, rather than the top (which is the way most switch LEDs are implemented). The net effect is that light is distributed better, both concerning the characters on the key caps and the glow underneath them.
For example, the secondary characters on the key caps are lit just as brightly as the primary ones. (In order to achieve this, Logitech had to squish the primary and secondary characters close together.)
A byproduct of the through-stem lighting is that the light distribution under the caps is well-balanced. Further, because these keyboards have a bowl design, with the backplate partially covered by a top panel, there’s just a soft underglow. This, as opposed to the bright (but sometimes harsh, and definitely uneven) lighting on top plate-style keyboards.
Teardown
Inside, the G810 has three LED controllers due to the more demanding RGB lighting.
The welds are almost all perfect, although there is some flux residue on some areas of the PCB.
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