Ducky One 3 Matcha Keyboard Review

Introduction

The famous british writer John Finnemore once wrote a sketch about how markets slavishly following trends mean that you actually have less choice than you used to. The example he gives is how mens dress shoes are all pointy-toed. Not that pointy-toed shoes are the current trend but we have some rounded or square toed ones. No, all of them are pointy now. What has this got to do with the Ducky One 3 Matcha keyboard you ask?

Since the introduction of backlighting for keys, initially only available in single colours but now largely found in RGB format, all mechanical keyboards seem to follow that trend to the exclusion of all other options. Yes you can have a white chassis or a black one, maybe if you’re super lucky you might get an aluminium coloured one, but they will all be in that monochrome shade and all have RGB lighting. The only way you can get something unlike that is to go for a keyboard that doesn’t have a suite of Cherry MX switches supplying the crisp typing experience we love so much.

Ducky is a Taiwanese company that eschew this design ethos and instead, with their range of keyboards, provide a whole host of colour options and even some very cool keycap designs. Probably our favourite of their choices has to be the Yellow Ducky, which is yellow in chassis and keycap, because it makes us laugh that a company called Ducky produces a keyboard that apes the famous yellow duck you have in the bathroom. That isn’t all they do though, and today we have their flagship keyboard, the One 3 – One because it’s their flagship, 3 because it’s the third iteration of the design – in a Matcha colour scheme. Matcha itself is a powdered green tea, probably most famous as the flavour behind the green KitKat. It’s impossible to be on the internet for any time without coming across the sheer volume of alternative KitKat flavours, and the Matcha green one is the one most people see first.

So if you’ve grown weary of black keyboards with RGB lighting, and instead want something away from the norm and soothing to the eye, the Ducky One 3 Matcha might be the very thing. Of course to be worthy of purchase it needs to be high quality too, and that’s what we’re here to find out.

Technical Specifications

You’ll notice straight away – if the image at the top of this review didn’t give it away, that the Ducky One 3 Matcha isn’t backlit. How much of a difference this makes to you is very much a case of personal preference. We think it has enough qualities that this is less of an issue than it might initially appear. However, before we get ahead of ourselves scroll down to see the trick the One 3 has up its sleeve, and then we’ll take a closer look.

  

Beneath the double layer PCB is a foam layer that is intended to ensure all your keystrokes are kept very quiet. Coupling this to the Cherry MX Red Silent switches equipped to our review sample should lead to a very peaceful typing experience.