Lighting
One of the major selling points of this keyboard is the fairly robust lighting options, even without any software Cougar has given users a lot of lighting choice.
To start you can pick any of these colors above for the static lighting. (Note some of the keys look dimmer, this was due to my camera all of the keys are equally as bright in real life.) Each color looks really good with the rainbow lighting being my personal favorite.
If you think static lighting is boring Cougar has you covered by including 12 various lighting effects and customizable option letting you pick which keys are lit up on a per key basis.
First off every time you plug-in the keyboard Cougar gives you this really cool startup animation. (Sorry for the shaky camera It’s difficult to hold a camera and plug a keyboard in at the same time.)
Next, you can choose between the animations below. Also, each animation can be done with each of the colors shown above as well as a rainbow color scheme.
Some effects react to your touch while some run on a loop.
This effect is labeled “Reactive”
This effect is labeled “Circle”.
This effect is labeled “Ripple”.
This effect is labeled “Star”.
This effect is labeled “Vanish” With this effect the light on the key you press turns off for a second before coming back.
This effect is labeled “Flow”.
This effect is labeled “Sparkle”
This effect is labeled “Rythm”.
This effect is labeled “Breathing”.
This effect is labeled “Swift”.
This effect is labeled “Arrow”.
This effect is labeled “Rain”.
As you can see from the videos above there’s a lot of options when it comes to how your keyboard looks but if you want more customization then Cougar gives you that option right on the keyboard.
This keyboard supports 5 separate custom lighting configurations. You get into this configuration mode by pressing the FN key you then select a number between 6-0 (1-5 have preset lighting configurations lighting up the most used keys with various genres) then you press FN + HOME to begin choosing what keys will be lit up. In this mode key presses won’t register on your system instead they will light up on a random color on the first keypress then cycle through the different colors with each key press.
In the picture above you can see a custom mode I made using the steps above. Obviously, this isn’t the only option as you can have any combo of keys on or off.
While I’m really happy this option is available it has some weird limits. The colors are completely random and the normal FN + DEL key combo used to change the color with the pre-set lighting doesn’t work so your only option if you want all of your custom keys to be the same color is to individually turn each key on and then press each key to cycle through the colors until each key is the same color, while this technically works it’s extremely time-consuming. I can’t think of a good reason why you couldn’t just use the included color changing key combo to also change the color of custom lighting configurations.
Also somewhat annoyingly I couldn’t find a way to edit lighting configurations once they’re saved since selecting the configuration using the FN + Number and then FN + HOME just delete the previous configuration.
Overall I really like how much customization Cougar gives users over how their keyboards look especially without requiring downloaded software. The lighting also looks really good without being absurdly overpowering.
I rate the lighting 4/5. The lighting looks really good and there’s a ton of customization here but there are a few flaws with the per-key customization that holds it back.
Now onto Gaming/Typing performance and misc features!
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