Dime's Fun stuff

SteelSeries Merc Stealth Highlights:

I bought this item after looking at the "best" Gamer keyboards on the market and I'm glad I mad the plunge. The keyboard lights up and thats a big plus because I prefer gaming with the lights off. It immerses me into the game more so than when lights are on. I also like the keypad on the right side of the board,

 not that the w, a ,s and d keys don't do well but I like how big the keys are and seems harder to loose your place whilst playing games that have Pvp (FPS, WoW,ect..) I do however have a little issue with the 1-11 keys above though...   It doesn't seem to be as intuitive for me as I would like sometimes I find myself looking to hit the 3 key and will hit 2 and 4  but miss three, not a good thing when in a intense battle online. The Software Z-Engine is great you can modify keys and even add macros to key strokes say you want to throw a nade in CSS and then switch from nade back to handgun instead of  main gun or even to knife, you can set up a macro to perform that action. I've personally never made any macros so I don't have alot of experience with it; I've yet to find a need to simplify my game play.

Call me old fashioned. However sometimes the Z-Engine keys don't seem to work in game and may require you to set it up in the games settings.

Media keys work great while in game I can use it to skip mp3's on Windows media player, forwards and backwards. I've used the usb hubs to charge my phone and ipod, but I already have 10 or so usb ports on my pc so I don't use them for my joystick or things of that sort. I've used the audio jacks once and find them to work fine though some people complain about buzzing, I didn't have this issue.  The right hand side is missing arrow keys and the numberlock pad has the action keys sharing same pad, you have to toggle num lock on and off to use Delete, Insert, ect..

Illuminated

Works great

Z-engine Software

Rubber keys make it easy to clean

Cons:

Pricey

Learning curve to learn new setup

5 out of 5 scale
Price                  2/5          
Design                4/5
Ease of Use        4/5

I would definately recommend this keyboard. Its a solid Gaming keyboard with alot of functionality.