When selecting a keyboard, the first things to check are the switches. Many low cost keyboards are built with poor quality switches. If, as me, you spend several hours every day using a computer, selecting the right keyboard is as most important than selecting the right bedding for sleeping!
For the switches, don't look around, Cherry MX is clearly the manufaturer that matters. Cherry is a german company who design swiches for more than 30 years and is clearly the world leader for keyboard switches.
The swiches are PCB mounted components. It can be used for keyboards, but also for many other electronics applications. The following picture shows the bottom face of a switch. The hole located on top of the picture is for backlighting. Depending on you switches, you can use:
The original Cherry MX switches comes in 6 original colors:
Depending of the filling and sound you expect, you can select one of six models. For a keyboard, in my opinion, three options remains :
Not easy to estimate how noisy are the switches before buying a keyboard. I recorded the sound of each switch. Listen carefully the following video. The sequence is in the following order: RED, BLACK, BROWN, BLUE, SILENT RED and SILENT BLACK.