Keyboard Backlight and What You Should Know About It

Backlighting, meaning illumination under the keys, has become a standard feature on many laptops and desktop keyboards. A backlit keyboard glows softly in the dark and makes the key labels visible in low-light conditions. For many users this is simply a nice convenience feature, but there is more to keyboard backlighting than just looking cool.

The most practical benefit of backlighting is visibility in dim environments. If you often type in rooms with low light, on airplanes with the overhead lights off, in coffee shops with mood lighting, or late at night without turning on the full overhead lights, a backlit keyboard makes it much easier to see the keys. For touch typists who never look at the keyboard, this may not matter much, but for casual users who sometimes need to glance at a key, backlighting is genuinely helpful.

Single-color backlighting is the simplest and most common type. The light behind all the keys is the same color, usually white, but often also available in blue, red, or other colors. You can typically adjust the brightness of the backlight and on many keyboards you can turn it off completely to save battery power.

RGB backlighting, which stands for Red Green Blue, allows each key to be individually lit in any of millions of colors. This is most commonly found on gaming keyboards where the colorful effects have become a style statement in the gaming community. RGB keyboards can be set to static colors, animated effects like waves of color sweeping across the keyboard, reactive effects where each key lights up when pressed, and many other programmable patterns.

While RGB backlighting started in gaming, it has spread to some non-gaming keyboards and is now available in many laptop lines. Some users love the ability to color-code sections of their keyboard, setting WASD keys in one color for gaming and other key groups in different colors to help remember shortcuts.

Battery life is the main downside of keyboard backlighting. The LEDs that create the backlight consume power. On a laptop, running the keyboard backlight continuously can reduce battery life by a noticeable amount. Most backlit laptop keyboards have automatic backlight timers that turn the backlight off after a few seconds of keyboard inactivity to save power.

Heat is a minor secondary concern. LEDs generate a small amount of heat, and in a laptop where heat management is already important, the additional heat from many LEDs can be a factor, though a small one for most keyboards.

For users who experience eye strain in dimly lit environments, backlighting can actually help in an indirect way. When your keyboard is visible without straining to see it, you can look at it occasionally without needing to increase room lighting, which in turn reduces the contrast between the bright screen and the dim surroundings that causes eye strain.

The keyboard simulator does not simulate backlighting effects directly, but the various themes available in the simulator create different visual impressions of the keyboard appearance. A dark theme with high-contrast key labels gives something of the feel of a backlit dark keyboard. If you are trying to decide whether to prioritize backlighting in your next keyboard purchase, experimenting with different simulator themes gives you a sense of how you feel about different keyboard visual aesthetics.