How High-End Peripherals Work

right because we're poor. Yeah, yeah, no, we're talking well, in some cases we're talking about extravagantly expensive peripherals, in other cases that they're not extravagantly expensive, but they are. It's definitely an investment. And if you are not the kind of person who would use these sort of things on a regular basis, it would definitely be an extravagance. True. And you you even mentioned that you have a few that aren't even computer related, right, Yes, that's true. Well,

we'll get into those. I guess okay, I thought, I thought. I started off with the Granddaddy, the one that made the news um when it was on a lot of the electronics and gadgets blogs about a year ago, a year and a half. Yeah, you might have heard of it. Um, this energy keyboard, Yes, about such the heck you say, Oh my gosh, you are right. Um, yes, I did write an article on this energy keyboard. Uh. Those guys are are pretty cool guys. They did not send me one.

But well, I mean, when you're talking about a twenty eight thousand dollar keyboard, yeah, they aren't really eager on sending out test copies even like, oh sure I'll send it back. No. Um, but let's let's clear up a few things first before we get too involved in this. Uh like what exactly? Yeah, with these blogs, when they say a twenty dollar keyboard, you know, you just sit there and think, who the heck is gonna pay twenty

eight grand for a keyboard? Well, the the analogy I used in the article, which I think is fairly apt, is to call you know, if you call this energy just a keyboard, it's like calling a Bentley two dollar radio, because the Bentley does have a radio in it, right, Um, but you're not paying two dollars for the radio. You're paying two hut dollars for the Bentley. Um, so you can drive the keyboard kind of No, No, not at all. No, you're taking the analogy too far. Let's step back a bit.

The key it's not just a keyboard. It's really a media and audio video production center, all in one little compact package. And I say little because if you've ever been in an audio video studio, like one of the really big professional ones, they're huge, and you've you've seen them, right of course. Yeah, you're in your career as a rock musician. God, you've seen these all the time, right

of course. Okay, so um, good old Filet and his drums. Um. So anyway, and we're not joking, he really and anyway, let's move on. So these these studios are rather large. They have these big consoles that are all specialized. Well, the Synergy keyboard. The one of the purposes for this is to kind of replace a lot of that equipment,

put it all in a very compact package. And the way it works is this, every single key on that keyboard is really a tiny computer monitor, So the keys can display different images based upon what sort of task you're doing. If you're just typing regular letter or an email or whatever, it could be a quarty keyboard and

everything just looks the way a normal keyboard would. If you go into video editing mode, you'll suddenly have the keys will just switch, so keys that you don't need they'll disappear, and a new key will appear in its place. Because the each key is a little monitor, and so you might have things like play and rewind and cut and paste and all that kind of stuff, the common things you would use. And it has a jog we deal,

it has its own little LCD screen. So um, it's actually, like I said, a full audio visual editing package in keyboard format. So let's not you know. That's that's probably why most people you know maybe had read that far. They're just like, wow, how can a keyboard cost that much? Well, when you're talking about replacing an entire studio, which could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, it's really, comparatively speaking, not that expensive. I'm still not gonna be buying one

anytime soon. I would love to see one in action. Um. I keep hoping that I'll I'll run into one at a convention or something, just so I can see it work in person, But um, yeah, I don't think I'll be cracking the bank open to to buy one. When I could buy a car, not a Bentley, but a car for that same amount. Well, it seems like we've come a long way from the video toaster days. You have that built into the keyboard itself, right, But we are actually going to talk about another uh computer keyboard

that allows you to display different things keys too. Yeah, the I believe you're referring to the Optimus Maximus, Yes, yes, which is a keyboard that dresses and gladiator clothes and has a sword and also is more than meets the eye.

We'll just go ahead across genre that. But it does have O. L E. D S or oh lads built into this screen and you can actually program the different keys, like if you wanted one to be the Firefox key, you can make it, you know, put the little Firefox logo in there and it will show up on the key because it's got a little video screen built into it with little led Shi kind of cool. You could actually put in animated gifts if you wanted to, so you can have a little a little yeah, like Sparkle

or twirl or whatever. Um. And this was a big hit for a while, especially when we kept waiting and waiting and yeah, this was one of those that was delayed for a really long time. And and there's a range of these. That's true, that's true. They a little le yeah, and and you can choose how many keys actually have this feature. So if you didn't want to pay the full one, the the knacked out one, if you will, as all of its keys uh in O L O L E de form that one's about um.

But you could get ones the where you're just like, okay, well just these four keys have the O L E D S or just the just the function keys um, and they were less expensive. They're still pretty pretty hefty price for a keyboard, but if you wanted to uh and and that, you could even have it where you could switch out keys eventually. So let's say that you know, you bought the keyboard, you got it with the ten function keys, and later on you want to upgrade, you

could do that. UM. Essentially you be paying the balance of whatever it was to get to the full keyboard. But but it gave you that option. So people who just wanted to try it out and see if that's what they wanted, and they only wanted to drop, say nine hundred dollars, could do that. Again, I don't think I'll be buying this keyboard anytime soon. Yeah, and I certainly wouldn't want to eat my lunch at my desk if I had one of these keyboards. Right, a little expensive.

And there are other keyboards we could talk about their their The gaming community has quite a few because a lot of people have the specialized needs, you know, they want to be able to fire and have a special control. They want to frag you in in a fraction of the second that they could with their old keyboards. Right, yeah, yeah, I've met you. You you ten year olds out there who can snipe me from a mile away, and one day you're going to be old and slow like I am.

But anyway, the two keyboards I was going to talk about, just very briefly, there's the the Microsoft Sidewinder X six gaming keyboard and then the Steel Series seven G keyboard. Um, these are both gaming keyboards. They both can store macros so that you can program a series of commands and and assign it to a single key and that way, you know, you can display your leaked skills by pressing

one button or another instead of like a series of them. Um. The Sidewinders actually kind of interesting from an aesthetic point of view, it's back lit with red light. It's red light glues from around your keys and uh, the sidewinders eighty bucks. The Steel series is a hundred and fifties. So we're talking about a much bigger step down in price from our others. But then again, we're talking about gaining here or not uh not not some special productions, right,

not a not a big production kind of keyboard. Um, so yeah, that that pretty much covers my my area of the keyboards. Did you have anything else on those? Not on keyboards? On keyboards? Why do you want to move on to next? Well, I was going to talk about other kinds of peripherals. You know a lot of a lot of peripherals that you'll find for your computer other than the standard mouse keyboard type stuff. Um, a lot of the high end and and pricing stuff is

going to be for gaming now. Um, it's really funny when I mentioned the video toaster a few minutes ago. I'm longtime listeners will probably remember that every once in a a while, throw in the Amiga because that was my first computer, and people used to ridicule the Amiga is a gaming machine, used to well, the thing was It was way before a lot of the other machines had full color and had stereo sound, and a lot of people would build games for it, which were at that

time really high end. UM. But of course those same people now are buying the five thousand dollar PCs with the tricked out water cooled UH processors and the high end graphics cards and the you know steering wheels with force uh force feedback, and the driving seats where you sit down in there, and the exactly with all the pedals and stuff, and those those you know, can cost thousands of dollars, you know, just as as add ons. I mean, this is not the kind of thing that

people are buying in in bulk. But you know, oh yeah, I'll just run down and pick one of those up one WARLD. I'm just gonna go grab another one. But there are other other peripherals too, I mean gaming consoles there. I thought of a couple that, you know, sort of off the beaten track, because I figured you were going to go for the computer e stuff and I was thinking about, well, I mean, gaming consoles are a form

of computers, UM. And I remember a few years ago there was a game for Xbox, the first Xbox called Steel Battalion. It was actually highly rated. I went and and you know, looked up a little information about how it had been received. But the big news before it came out, I remember, was that it came out with this huge console of tan. It's a tank game. Um, I think where a Mecca game. I was on the impression of his tank on me. You can tell I

don't own an Xbox anyway. Um, but it came out with this this uh big board of controls where you could use all sorts of different levers and buttons to to uh you know, arm your weapons and move the

thing around. And it actually had more than forty buttons with two joysticks and three foot pedals, which is you know, you think about an Xbox game or any console game, really they're around fifty bucks, right, fifty Well that pushed the price of this game up to two because it came with this specialized console, which was one of the most expensive games out there. Yeah, and and really it's

it's expensive for now. Well yeah, but you see them a little more often now because you have games like rock Band, where you were to buy the full rock Band set that's in the that's around that range. It's funny you should mention rock band, is it? Yes? And uh and also the drummer thing going into this, you can see why I'm I'm kind of keen on this thing. Um ion Who's booth? I visited at c E S, but I didn't see actually this particular peripheral. UM. They've come out with a new uh drum set for a

rock band called the drum Rocker. And it's they actually worked with the electronics manufacturer Elasis. They make keyboards and electronic percussion and all kinds of uh, you know, electronic instruments. Um. And this has four drum pads with a kick drum and two symbols, and it's it's actually made of aluminum rather than the plastic that you would find in the typical rock band kits. So I mean it's it's more robust. People are gonna yeah, people are really gonna hey, yeah,

thank you for doing that. So I didn't have to say rock out wait I already did. Um Anyway, Okay, this this is actually a pretty pricey set too. But not only do you work over the additional money for for this set, you also can buy an additional symbol for fifty dollars, or the drum throne, which is what we uh call the seat the drummer sits on, and I still don't know why. Yeah, it's a stool, but

we call it the throne. And then you can, if you really want, you can actually buy a drum brain, which is essentially the computer that goes along with the electronic drum set, the Elasis d M five drum brain. Uh. You can add that for an additional three sixty so you don't have to be playing rock band with it.

You can actually use them for regular electronic drums, so that here, you know, you can just hear the the chitching sound every time you add on something else too, right, But you know, if you're really into rock band, yeah, or if you really really are trying to start up that flock of Seagulls cover band, or you need those electronic drum sounds. I told you not to mention the new wave roots come out, all right, Okay, I see your console stuff, and I'm gonna I'm gonna switch back

over to computers. I'm gonna talk about computer mice just really briefly. You want to talk talk about a little bit about the Yeah, yeah, so you know your standard computer mouse costs maybe between fifteen twenty bucks something like that if you want to wireless one and maybe thirty plus.

There's some there's some more expensive ones out there. There's the Space Navigator mouse, which is that really a three D mouse um where it looks almost like a paddle like on the old Attori you know what I'm talking about, kind of the same thing. You can twist it to make it go left or right, and you can tilt it to make it zoom in or zoom out. It's useful for things like if you're in a CAD program, UM architecture program, or Google Earth, you can use zoom

in and out and and reorient yourself. UM. Not necessarily useful for other applications, but it's pretty cool. UM. Then there are other things like there's the novent Falcon haptic mouse, which it looks really neat. It's got a base unit that has some articulated arms that reach out and all attached to a small UH sphere, and you hold the sphere and you your motions. You you move the sphere in three dimensions, so you can move it in and out.

You can move up and down, left, right, and you can in any direction you want, and the articulated arms allow you to do that, and your actions are are transferred into whatever computer realm you're exploring of that time, and there's even haptic feedback there so we can push it back against you for certain games and things. Um, that's pretty cool too. I actually saw one of those at c E S. I didn't get a chance to play with it. There was actually a pretty big crowd

around that. But those those look pretty neat too. Uh. But I was really going to go into the grand daddy of expensive mouse uh systems here. Um, and it's not expensive because of its tech specs. Uh. It is

the pet says now computer mouse. It is twenty four thousand dollars for a mouse for a grand less than this energy and yet all it does is click And it's just a regular mouse, except that's made out of eighteen carrot white gold and has fifty nine diamonds in it, like like on the on the surface of the mouse. And you can have it in either a scattered or flower design. I'm hoping that this is a laser not at all, so you still have to pull the ball out and clean. Yeah, you know, but it's it's it's

made from poor people. No, I mean no, it's but it's it's alright, you go breaking news. Though, before you can only get in the scatter diamond or the flower diamond pattern. Now you can use your you can choose your own pattern and even use your initials if you like. So if you were holding back because you're like, well I don't really like the scatter of the flower, and then now you can actually drop that twenty four grand. Um it's mainly sold out of the UK. Yeah, I

thought that would be a nice little addition. And then I was gonna talk also really quickly about monitors. Yeah. When I was looking for monitors to see like what would be a really cool, like big high end peripheral, I found the enlightened i T seven to zero two seventy two inch touch screen. That's huge obviously. Um, it's got two different models. There's a three thousand dollar model which chooses a light pen that has an infrared tip

to it. There's an infrared camera that's the screen is backlit obviously, so there's an infrared camera on the back right next to the light source that can detect where the light pin is. Then there's a four thousand dollar model that uses cameras mounted on the top of the screen to triangulate positions. You can you can use your finger on that one, so you would put your finger against the screen and the cameras detect where your finger is.

There's no actual touch screen technology on the screen itself. It's all done through visual like optics. So you move your finger around and it follows your finger and that's how you can change the input. So yeah, if you have three or four grand to drop, you can get a nice, nice large screen. I don't think our cubicles would even allow us seventy two inch screen in them, would they? Probably not? Note to self get bigger cubicle. Excellent.

I was wondering if this is the kind of thing that we would need if we were going to move to the next step of the Minority Report era. You know, you start drawing in the air and until you get the holographic displays. Yeah, exactly. Boy, those would be cool, Yeah they would. I bet they're expensive, probably, I guess that would counts a high end peripheral I'm sure, and the technology you need to run away from the and I think we're getting off track here, maybe here, maybe

maybe we can wrap this up. Okay, you think, all right, Well, there are plenty of other high end peripherles out there. We didn't even cover sound systems or or other input systems like Waycom tablets, which are pretty darn cool too, although most of those are pretty affordable. Yeah. There, I was looking at a two thou one. Wow. Yeah no, but it was really nice. Um. So you can read all about these kinds of systems on how stuff works dot com right now. We cover everything from keyboards to

monitors everything in between. So check out the website learn a little bit more about this. Figure out. You're gonna drop all that massive cash you got sitting around, and we will talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com. Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you