gordon861
I would be willing to pay for a decent mechanical keyboard, maybe even a £100+ if I knew it was worth the money. But there are so many options for mechanical keys Cherry, Black, Blue etc that I don't want to risk this sort of money and end up with something I might hate after a couple of weeks, let alone years.
One solution would be to take advantage of Distance Selling Regs to try them out and send them back in 14 days, but I don't want to do that to a company that have been helpful in the past and screw them around.
I'm currently using a Razer Reclusa keyboard from when they teamed up with Microsoft, so the old Razer stuff seems pretty reliable.
Coolermaster's Quickfire Rapid (tenkeyless) and XT (full size) would be my recommendations. They are very favourably reviewed, on the cheaper side of the spectrum and I have personally had a great experience with the latter for roughly two years.
In terms of switches, I have tried blue and brown. Aside from the added “clickyness” of blue, there's not much difference (I can barely tell the difference when wearing headphones).
If you are expecting a mechanical keyboard to significantly improving your gaming performance, prepare to be disappointed. It doesn't make much difference, apart from improving comfort, for me. However I am able to type significantly more quickly and accurately because of the consistent feedback, which membrane keyboards lack. This benefit may not be available from red/black switches because they are linear, but I have no personal experience. Linear switches are supposedly the best for gaming, however, but I am sceptical as to whether that difference is significant.
I personally don't find back-lighting desirable. It was a novelty for a while but I now turn it off on my Dell XPS 13 laptop, although it does occasionally come in useful when typing in passwords in dark environments.