Epomaker RT80
4. Conclusion
The EPOMAKER RT80 is an interesting product since it includes two screens that can be used by users to interact and hopefully increase overall productivity. The main product comes with a 75% mechanical design while EPOMAKER also offers a full layout with the RT100 model. The board uses Flamingo switches that have a very good feel. The used keycaps are made out of PBT, so the surface should be somewhat more resistant to turning shiny from skin oils, compared to ABS, and are also very good of course all buttons are swapable, either to change the default switches and keycaps. The build material is from plastic around the keyboard and the tested color looks very good to the eye, the RT80 has also a decent weight to carry around. The gasket-mounted design with five layers of foam lessens the sound of keyboard typing noise. All three connection modes are very good, either cable/2.4GHz or BT, we didn't notice high lag so gaming would be great with this baby. The product comes also with a 5000mAh rechargeable battery that promises many hours of working before re-charging it. The keyboard also offers NKRO (N-key rollover) so you will get accurate registration of key presses.
All keys have RGB LEDs with 16 default lighting patterns and can be customized with the EPOMAKER driver software. The included USB cable feels very high quality with a blue LED light that gives that extra touch. While referring to touch...this product has a unique small LCD touch screen to further give you more creativity, with 3 layers of four operations from default volume controls, print screen, Windows settings, and more. In case you want you can customize the LCD screen to also include .gif files. The touch response is very good and has high brightness for day use. You can also add your shortcuts to specific software for quick launch even, this is limited to only 4 software. Users can upgrade the keyboard from the included EPOMAKER driver software that has overall control over the whole keyboard for those advanced functions. There is also a second LCD screen that can present time, battery, and connection and also can include .gif art and animations. Down to the LCD touch screen, users will also find three physical buttons that can be used to command music players, even if we would like to be slightly softer.
As with all products, apart from the positive, there are also neutral and negative points as well. We will present our thoughts and you can judge yourself if those matter or not. The included USB cable has good quality, however when using other third-party USB cables we did have some connection issues, be warned. The keyboard has two screens, one touch, and one nontouch. Both need the EPOMAKER software driver to work properly, which may annoy some users. The small LCD screen, while sounds like a great idea, we found it to be rather limited and the mounting mechanism isn't great, you have to remove the USB dongle to get it installed and even that doesn't feel very secure. Also, the reading angle should be higher cause it is 90 degrees compared to the typing position. The USB connection is at the back so some users who would like better cable management would be disappointed. You cannot adjust the LCD touchscreen brightness levels, which may trouble you in a dark environment. Also when sliding left/right, the LCD touchscreen defaults to the EPOMAKER logo instead of staying at the last selected function, which is again annoying. Note that you cannot change to a custom splash screen, so you are stuck with the EPOMAKER logo. Lastly, the EPOMAKER driver software could be better designed and we hope that in the future better GUI will be available.
Overall we find the EPOMAKER RT80 to be a good product with some questionable design choices but the typing experience is good. If LCD screens are your thing, then the RT80 could be your next best friend for the 75% mechanical keyboard market. We hope that EPOMAKER with the RT80 v2 will offer more choices for the built-in LCD screen and change the installation mechanism of the second screen and of course its overall usability.