Ranked Pudding V1 Keycaps Reviewed
In an effort to tone down the sheer transparent majesty of the KiiBOOM Phantom I’m putting through its paces, I bought myself some “pudding” keycaps from Amazon.
The switches on the KiiBOOM really like to pull out with the keycaps! 🫠
I went for Ranked’s Pudding caps, because that’s what came up first, opting for white tops in an attempt to capture that classic white/transparent Apple A1048 keyboard look. They were £20, which isn’t bad for any set of keycaps, and are somewhat ISO/ANSI cross compatible.
The “pudding” style keycap is evocative of Japanese Custard Pudding, or Purin, though you might be more familiar with the names Flan or Crème Caramel. The design is simple- a doubleshot moulded keycap that sees most of the key made of a translucent, milky-white plastic juxtaposed by an opaque top to give some visual contrast for the illuminated key legends.
The end result is pretty decent but unfortunately this key set is missing some useful alternate key sizes so I’m going to need the V2 set!
I had hoped they would diffuse out the bright backlighting of the KiiBOOM Phantom 98 while still giving a similarly dramatic lighting effect. They did.
The translucent “pudding” base gives a really soft diffusion surface to spread out the light of south-facing LEDs. I love the look, though I’m not totally sold with it on the Phantom 98 and think black topped pudding on a simple black keyboard would look much, much better. In daylight the milky white on solid white contrast is enough to make the legends visible even without backlighting, but in the dark you really need the backlight on for the legends to be visible.
Full view, complete with extremely chaotic mixed profile keys as I tried to find enough to fill out the bottom right edge. The backlight is actually fully on but you can only see a partial view as it scans.
The downside of Ranked’s V1 Pudding caps is the lack of key options. You get only the bare minimum keys needed for an ISO UK conversion- our chonky Enter/Return key, a 1.25u Shift key, and two 1u keys to tuck up next to Z and Enter. You also get no options for alternate sized modifier keys, which left me with quite a few gaps to fill on the slightly awkward 95% KiiBOOM. Since the keys are OEM profile – various heights and angles to give a sculpted feel – you can’t easily swap out keys from other rows to bodge this without your keyboard looking like British teeth (I can say that, I live here!) I guess that’s why there’s now a 145 key V2 set available with more options.
Ordered some Ranked Pudding V1 PBT keycaps. This, uh, space bar looks gnarly!
Another downside, the set I ordered had some nasty plastic injection moulding defects along the full length of the space bar. This wasn’t super visible when they were in use, but it’s still a nuisance. Do inspect your keycaps before you spend 40 minutes swapping them out!
If you’ve picked up a cheap full-sized mech keyboard and you double-check this V1 set has everything you need – pay careful attention to the sizes of your modifier keys and anything else that’s not alphanumeric – then these caps are a very, very affordable way to turn something bland and joyless into something that really pops.