Tesoro Excalibur Spectrum Keyboard Review

By David Ramsey

Manufacturer: Tesoro Technology
Product Name: Excalibur Spectrum RGB Mechanical Gaming Keyboard
Model: TS-G7SFL RD
UPC: 8411630230 EAN: 4717964400420
Price As Tested: $119.99 (Newegg / Amazon)

Full Disclosure: Tesoro Technology USA provided the product sample used in this article.

Many enthusiasts probably haven’t heard of Tesoro Technology, which is perhaps understandable, since the company is so secretive their web page doesn’t even have an “About Us” section. Apparently based in Milpitas, California, Tesoro started out making mechanical keyboards a few years ago and has since branched out into mice and headsets, all aimed at gamers. Benchmark Reviews has just received their latest product, the RGB-illuminated and programmable Excalibur Spectrum mechanical gaming keyboard, so let’s take a look at it!

Although it’s rather generic looking, the Excalibur Spectrum supports a wide range of lighting functions as well as a robust macro capability.

• Seven backlighting modes, plus per-key color adjustability
• Individual mechanical key switches with 60 million key stroke durability
• 512K of built-in memory supporting 5 gaming profiles
• N-key rollover
• 1,000-Hz polling rate
• Choice of Kailh blue, brown, or red switches

Let’s take a look at this keyboard in the next section.

For a while, it was popular for gaming keyboards to adopt dramatic shapes and colors; now the market seems to be swinging back towards plain black keyboards with minimal bezels, and putting the development money into features rather than flash. The Tesoro Excalibur Spectrum wouldn’t look out of place on a secretary’s desk– at least as long as none of the more dramatic backlighting effects were turned on.

The back of the keyboard has only a label and the standard fold-out feet. There aren’t even any molded channels to let you adjust where the USB cable exits.

The USB cable, while not detachable, is braided, has a gold-plated connector, and the cable head is branded with the Tesoro name and logo. None of this adds any functionality but it’s expected at this level.

Nobody expects media with drivers to be included any more, but vendors now seem intent on saving pennies by providing the smallest amount of paper documentation possible. An advertising brochure (left) and a very small guide (right) are all you get.

How small? Well, here’s the size of the printing: even a teenager is going to have trouble reading print this tiny– each line of text is just under 1mm tall. As is common these days, the guide covers multiple languages so there’s only one needed for all markets.

Let’s take a closer look at this keyboard in the next section.

The Excalibur Spectrum is, physically, a very basic 104-key keyboard bereft of features like detachable cables, macro keys, and a USB hub. It has no dedicated macro or media keys; instead, media functions are overloaded onto the function keys, and accessed by holding down the “Fn” key when pressing them. Tesoro uses an odd, blocky font on its key caps.

Tesoro openly advocates anarchy– at least, for gaming.

My review keyboard came with Kailh Brown key switches, which are Chinese clones of the German Cherry MX Brown switches. I couldn’t feel any difference between the Kailh switches and the equivalent Cherry switches. The RGB LED is visible at the top of the key switch, and Tesoro has painted the metal switch mounting plate white– this reflects the colors of the LEDS so that you have a nice ambient background glow that follows the key illumination.

The Kailh switches have the same limitation as Cherry illuminated switches in that the top-mounted LED doesn’t light the bottom portion of the key. Tesoro works around this by putting the shifted legends at the top of the key as well. It looks a little funny but keeps the lighting nice and even.

Double-shot key caps (where the legends are molded completely through the key in a contrasting color of plastic) are very rare at the OEM level these days. Like most vendors, Tesoro’s backlit key caps are molded in a translucent plastic, then painted with some sort of black coating. I don’t know what the coating is but I’ve used many such keyboards over the years and it seems durable. Since the Kailh switches use standard Cherry key caps, you have a wide selection of third-party caps if you want to swap them out.

The backlighting is bright and even, and the white switch plate provides a nice background.

With a keyboard like this, it’s all about the software. Let’s take a look at it in the next section.

As you’d expect these days, no installation media is included with the keyboard; you’re instructed to download the Configuration Utility from Tesoro’s web site. The Excalibur Spectrum Configuration Utility isn’t documented anywhere (I don’t consider the extremely cursory web-site instructions, accessed by clicking the question mark box at the upper right of the utility’s window, to be “documentation”), so you’re left to explore its functions yourself. Fortunately, most of the features are pretty straightforward: tabs along the top of the window denote which of the keyboard’s five profiles you’re dealing with (a separate PC Mode disables customizations); while buttons at the lower left select the feature you’re working with. The blank area at the lower right generally contains color or illumination mode options, depending on what you’re doing.

There are eight functions you can select: Macro Setting lets you define macros, while Key Assignment remaps any key to any other key. Launch Program opens a specified program when you press a given key, and SYNC Program activates a pre-defined profile when you run a given program. Disable makes a key completely nonfunctional, and Default erases all key customizations. Last, Illumination selects a solid backlight color for the entire keyboard, while Lighting Effects specifies one of several different lighting animations.

There are eight different lighting effects that flash, strobe, fade, and ripple the keyboard lights either continuously or when you press a key. The most visually impressive is Rainbow Wave, which sends a beautifully-graduated spectrum of light flowing continuously across the keyboard. Spectrum Colors, un-intuitively, is what you select when you want to define key backlight color on a key-by-key basis. You can rotate through these modes without invoking the utility by pressing Fn->left/right arrow, and control the brightness by pressing Fn->up/down arrow.

The configuration utility’s color picker is what you’ll use any time you need to select a key or overall backlight color. You can choose from nine pre-defined colors or specify RGB values directly. In this image I’m choosing individual key colors; keys that are already defined are, oddly, shown in purple on the virtual keyboard, rather than the color they’ve been defined.

Tesoro’s macro feature is very well implemented, and, unlike many others, includes full editing capabilities: you can tweak times at the millisecond level, and insert, delete, and rearrange keystrokes. Only the incredibly small type labeling many of the functions detracts from the macro feature. Macros are stored in the selected profile, which itself is stored in the keyboard’s memory, so you can define macros and take the keyboard to another computer and they’re still work. You can select profiles 1 through 5 by pressing Fn->F1 through Fn-F5. However, you cannot define macros using any modifier keys (Shift, Control, FN, etc.)

The Excalibur Spectrum’s RGB LEDs are quite bright, and the white-painted keyboard mounting plate reflects any light that didn’t make it through the key cap’s translucent legends back towards the user. Any key can be set to be any color, and this information is stored with the selected profile. This is handy for flagging groups of keys in a game.

I’ll present my final thoughts and conclusion about this keyboard in the next section.

The Tesoro Excalibur Spectrum keyboard is the latest entry in an increasingly crowded field of RGB-backlit keyboards. It compensates for a very plain physical appearance with an excellent macro capability and a wide array of lighting options. Its use of Kailh switches provides the feel (and, hopefully, the longevity) of Cherry MX switches while allowing Tesoro to set the price so that (as of the time of this writing) it’s the least-expensive RGB keyboard that offers per-key lighting. At this price point, you’re trading features like dedicated macro and media keys and USB hubs for quality mechanical switches and fancy lighting.

This is the second keyboard I’ve tested recently with the Chinese Kailh clones of Cherry MX switches. Since Cherry’s patents expired, a number of companies– Greely, Kailh, Gateron, and others– have entered the market with clone switches that accept Cherry-format key caps and presumably cost less than the “genuine” article. So far my experience has been limited, but the Kailh Blue and Kailh Brown key switches I’ve tested have felt exactly like their Cherry counterparts; only time will tell if they hold up as well. I’ve found Brown switches to be a good choice for gamers who want more tactile feedback than the linear Red and Black switches provide, without a potentially annoying audible click.

That said, I have only one real complaint (aside from Tesoro’s predilection for using absurdly tiny lettering in its physical documentation on on-screen utility software): you cannot use modifiers when redefining a key or assigning macros. You can’t, for example, set a macro to execute when you press FN-“A”, or Ctrl-“A”, or Shift-“A”, or anything other than a plain “A”. Since the keyboard has no dedicated macro keys, this means every macro you define takes a “real” key out of circulation. This seems a silly limitation and I hope Tesoro addresses it in a future release of their software.
I’m very impressed with the Excalibur Spectrum, not so much for its features, which can be had in several of its competitors, but for its value: at $119.99 (Newegg / Amazon), it’s the least expensive key-level RGB keyboard available, and yet Tesoro didn’t skimp on the quality: the keyboard uses high quality mechanical switches and barely flexes when I pick it up by either and and attempt to twist it.

Yes, it’s a pretty basic keyboard once you look up from the macros and the pretty lights. But the Kailh switches provide a quality typing experience: even when you’re not gaming, it’s a real treat for the fingers, especially compared to the rubber-dome atrocities that grace even expensive systems these days.

From a gaming perspective, the only drawback is a lack of dedicated macro keys, and the inability to define modifier-based macros like Fn-A. That issue aside, this is one of the more impressive keyboards I’ve had the pleasure to test.

+ High quality Kailh key switches
+ Per-key RGB backlighting; onboard CPU and memory for lighting effects and macros
+ Excellent macro definition and editing features
+ Great bang for the buck

– No dedicated macro or media keys
– Very plain physical appearance
– Cannot define macros using modifier keys

• Performance: 9.50
• Appearance: 8.00
• Construction: 9.50
• Functionality: 9.50
• Value: 9.75

Excellence Achievement: Benchmark Reviews Golden Tachometer Award.

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