Introduction

Ah, how time flies! My very first review for TechPowerUp was late last year with a look at the Bloody B840 keyboard with their Light Strike optical LK2 switches. One of the cons I had was the limited backlighting control and poorly designed software for what is otherwise a well-priced keyboard. Bloody got back to me a few weeks ago with their new B820R keyboard that has "RGB Animation" in its tagline, and so here we are to take a look at another of their keyboards now.


The B820R is a full-size, modified ANSI layout (at least in the case of my sample) keyboard with an entirely black color scheme - a slight departure from their golden-framed keyboards from before. The minimalist design is a likely attempt in Bloody's expansion to the North American market wherein people tend to prefer such aesthetics over more aggressive designs, and the RGB backlighting is a must these days to carve out some attention in the heavily crowded gaming keyboard market. Thanks again to Bloody Gaming and A4Tech for providing a review sample for us, and let us begin with a look at the specifications below.

Specifications

Packaging and Accessories

Bloody has adopted a one-piece packaging for the B820R keyboard with an illustration of the keyboard and its salient marketing features on the front and back, and two seals and a double flap on the side help keep the contents inside in check. There is a cutout on the front to take a look at some of the keys inside, which does not really do much more than tell you that there is a keyboard inside as there remains a plastic barrier in between anyway.


Open the box and we see the keyboard right away, with the aforementioned plastic dust protector on top to keep it pristine for that unboxing experience. There are three thick, soft foam pieces on the sides for further protection, and the keyboard appears inverted as a result of the cable and accessories being present in a cardboard foldaway section on the front rather than the back, where they usually are with other keyboards. Bloody includes a quick start guide that is useful in quickly describing how to actuate the secondary functions on the keyboard and is a quick primer on the on-board and driver-based backlighting control hotkeys. Also included here in a plastic ziplock bag are some replacement keycaps and a keycap puller.


The included keycap puller is a plastic ring one, which has the potential to scratch the sides and bottom of keycaps, but is less expensive to manufacture than the wire-style puller I personally prefer. The keycaps are an orange in color and made out of silicone rubber, which has these provide a different color and material finish relative to the stock keycaps. The legends are doubleshot injected, so you will not wear them out anytime soon, and they are backlighting compatible, as seen above. These keycaps have a contoured finish as opposed to the ribbed finish the ones that came with the B840 have, and in practice, I personally prefer the older ones as my fingers did slide ever so much once in a while when gaming on these.