Ozone Blade Review

👤by Tim Harmer Comments 📅11-05-13
Packaging and First Look



Ozone have kept the front of the Blade packaging as clear as possible, setting aside many of the marketing tweaks often seen on medium-to-high end products of the same type. Instead they concentrate on a prominent image of the Blade keyboard – in this case with the long-shift EU layout – and four key features which they feel would be of most interest to the potential user. Also noteworthy is the red livery common to Ozone products, although the keyboard includes a blue illumination capability.

The layout of the keyboard inside is actually denoted by a label on the front – here it’s clearly identified as a English/UK style – but if it comes with none then be sure to get confirmation from the retailer of the specific SKU before purchasing.

With some justification Ozone feel that the 128KB onboard memory, dual-illumination backlight, profile switching and macro keys are major selling points worthy of emblazoning on the front. Interestingly they make no mention here of the 1ms response time and anti-ghosting capability, the latter of which one would imagine is of primary importance to any gamer.



Unsurprisingly the packaging rear contains the majority of the information you will need to ascertain that this product is a little more than your average gaming keyboard. Key features from the front are repeated, whilst additional information such as accelerated USB polling rate, light intensity controller and anti-ghosting capability make their first appearance. The rear is also where you will discover that the second lighting option is blue, with small image inserts highlighting specific portions of the keyboard. We should note here that lighting appears to be limited to the main keyboard sections and two accent areas, macro keys to either side of the keyboard are not lit.



Specific technical information is shown in ten different languages, providing some general compatibility guidelines which should be comprehensible to most readers across the world. Accompanying these facts in the bottom half of the panel is an endorsement from Spanish pro-gamer Juan “VortiX” Moreno extolling the virtues of the Blade’s mechanical keys and 1000Hz polling rate. Weighty words indeed.

They keyboard is held firmly in place by 1cm thick foam, ensuring that there should be very little opportunity for damage so long as couriers take reasonable care in transit. Curiously Ozone have included a Driver CD and User Manual in the package; other manufacturers have moved away from this to reduce manufacturing and shipping costs whilst also ensuring that any new user will be pushed towards the latest version of the software rather than a defunct earlier version. On the other hand including a user manual can help as keyboards become ever more complex, especially if you decide not to host one on your website.



One piece of information which is lacking is the location of the macro keys. One might assume that the eight keys around the edge of the keyboard are all macro keys, but this is not the case – only MACRO1-4 on the left hand side are. The remaining six macro keys are made up of the INSERT/HOME/PGUP/DELETE/END/PGDN block (often know as the command keys); this information is only revealed within the user manual and driver software.

Overall the packaging for the Blade is solid and robust, providing adequate protection for the contents and information to any interested parties. It won’t exactly leap off the shelf, the colours aren’t quite vibrant enough and black/red is a common scheme, but it does push the keyboard into looking more like a high-end product than would otherwise be the case.


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