Tesoro Excalibur Spectrum Keyboard Review: Fun Fury of Fancy Fingering
Tesoro Excalibur Software
Installing the Tesoro Excalibur Software is not necessary for using the Excalibur Spectrum keyboard but it does open up more options for the user such as a much more comprehensive macro recording, profile management and individual key controls. The layout of the software is such that an overview of the keyboard layout is constantly on the screen and the configuration screen only changes on the lower right side of the window. This limits the work area quite a bit and thus a lot of the options appear very small on the screen and are difficult to read such as the Macro sub-menu which is forced to use extremely small fonts to fit all the options in half of the screen. Macro settings are satisfactorily comprehensive however, should the user be able to see its tiny print.
Since the screen only changes on the lower right side, users have to click cancel, OK or exit on every sub-menu that shows on that side of the screen or else nothing else will be accessible (Windows “ding” sound popping out). The second option is a powerful key assignment option which allows users to re-assign any key except the Fn key. This is done by selecting the key (highlighted in yellow) and simply pressing what value it should be replaced by.
Programs can also be synched and launched with the Tesoro Excalibur software (up to five programs).
The Illumination option is for selecting the full backlit color, either via palette presets or by inputting a corresponding RGB value equivalent.
Default color presets (RGB):
- red – 231-0-24
- orange – 238-156-0
- yellow – 255-243-0
- green – 16-177-99
- light blue – 17-111-183
- blue – 19-41-143
- violet – 94-27-132
- pink – 232-0-127
- white – 255-255-255
As you can see some values are not the standard colors thus the red looks more pinkish than a bright red. Users can just change the red to 255, 0, 0 to get a brighter, more standard red than the out-of-the-box default. The Lighting Effects option has the rest of the LED lighting controls with the nine presets available. The last Spectrum color option under Lighting effects however open up the Tesoro Excalibur for per-key editing and even allows users to set the LED behaviour of the key.
