Most people don't spend a lot of time thinking about the keycaps on their keyboards. Chances are, they are white with black text or black with white text and that's about it. Like with all things (mechanical) keyboards, though, there are seemingly endless choices. For a long time, the most sought-after keycaps were those manufactured by Germany's GMK. But as the mechanical keyboard hobby exploded in recent years, GMK simply couldn't keep up with the demand, and new sets -- which in the mechanical keyboard world tend to take the form of group buys -- often took a year or longer to ship.

While a lot of enthusiasts love GMK's ability to print vibrant colors on its ABS keycaps, the company's recent manufacturing issues and delays cost it a lot of goodwill in the community. Unsurprisingly, GMK's issues opened up the doors to other high-quality keycap manufacturers, including the likes of EnjoyPBT and Drop. And while Drop also offers a number of GMK-made sets in its store (without the group-buy hassle), the company also recently launched its DCX Keycaps, which by now are available in nine variants.

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I'll admit that I've never been a huge fan of Drop's default MT3-profile keycaps. Some people love them, but they are just a bit too high and round for me. The new DCX profile, though, which Drop says took two years to develop, is more akin to the standard Cherry layout that you're probably used to. Indeed, unless you look closely, you may mistake these for Cherry-profile keycaps. At $99 for a full set of thick double-shot ABS keycaps, they are also a bit of a bargain (by mechanical keyboard standards, at least) -- though if you're a Mac user, you'll likely want to spend the extra $25 for the MacOS-specific keys.

These keycaps are easy to like. Drop sent me a review sample of its black-on-white set. The legends are crisp -- one of the hallmarks of good ABS keycaps -- and there were no manufacturing defects that I could find. Unlike cheaper ABS sets, Drop's keycaps don't feel too smooth, and while they'll likely show some shine after a few years of usage (all ABS keycaps do), there's obviously no sign of that yet. They are not as thick as some of the PBT keycaps I mostly use on my personal keyboards, but are comparable to the GMK keycaps Drop itself currently sells. As such, on the same board, the sound they make is just a little bit higher than that of a thicker PBT set, but that's barely noticeable, and in terms of sound, the switches, plates and everything else in your board will make far more of a difference anyway.